Who gets to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope? Astronomers work to fight bias

The scientists who eventually get to peer out at the universe with NASA's powerful new James Webb Space Telescope will be the lucky ones whose research proposals made it through a highly competitive selection process.

But those that didn't make the cut this time can at least know that they got a fair shot, thanks to lessons learned from another famous NASA observatory.

Webb's selection process was carefully designed to reduce the effect of unconscious biases or prejudices by forcing decision-makers to focus on the scientific merit of a proposal rather than who submitted it.

"They assess every one of those proposals. They read them. They don't know who wrote them," explains Heidi Hammel, an interdisciplinary scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope. "These proposals are evaluated in a dual-anonymous way, so that all you can see is the science."

This is a recent innovation in doling out observing time