For the past four years, the James Webb space telescope has been returning stunning images of stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe. Parked in orbit a million miles from the Earth, the observatory is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine that shares a special engineering heritage with a swelling number of modern devices, from mobile phones to medical scanners and turbine blades.
All are products of precision engineering, a discipline that blends the traditions of surveying, navigation, astronomy and time-keeping to create the technology that underpins our lives today. And one of its prime exponents was Patrick McKeown.
