The James-Webb Space Telescope: Why, Where and How, and what does Hawaii have to do with it.

This non-technical after-dinner presentation will give a broad overview on why infrared astronomy is so important that the James-Webb Space Telescope was chosen as the successor to the very successful Hubble Space Telescope. The evolution in the design of infrared space telescopes and the choice of the orbit of JWST will be described.

A large, cooled infrared space telescope offers unprecedented sensitivity but exploiting this opportunity required the development of infrared detector arrays of unprecedented sensitivity. After a brief detour into the solid-state physics of infrared detector materials, in particular HgCdTe, the detector development program at the University of Hawaii will be described. Together with our industrial partner, Teledyne Imaging Sensors, the UH Institute for Astronomy developed the HAWAII-2RG detector arrays that are used in all but one of the JWST science instruments. Finally, I will describe my ownJWST observing project, the study of the properties of dust grains in dense molecular clouds before and at the start of star-formation.