What requires more gold, Oscars statuettes or the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors?

Over the Oscars’ 90 years, 3,072 awards have been presented. Each gold-plated statuette stands 13.5 inches high and weighs 8.5 pounds. Each year, 50 statues are manufactured in a process that remained largely the same until 2016, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

That year, the Academy returned to casting statuettes in bronze, using 3D scans of an original 1929 Oscars award. They also turned to Brooklyn, New York-based Epner Technology to plate Oscars in 24-karat gold to solve the problem of the gold plating flaking off.

Epner uses a process it developed in partnership with NASA to produce a more durable finish. That process was recently used to coat a 32-foot refrigerant tube that cools the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, aboard the James Web Space Telescope (JWST).

Gold, it turns out, is important in building spacecraft.

“It is good at reflecting infrared wavelengths of light, which help to detect celestial objects from very far away," explains Goddard Space Flight Center physicist Jim Tuttle. “Gold is really inert. It doesn't oxidize at all.” That means it won’t tarnish.

Gold is also incredibly stable, which is why it was used in the creation of the records aboard the Voyager spacecraft. It is expected to survive about 1 billion years of radiation bombardment.

A different process was used to achieve the thin layer of gold required on the tennis-court-sized primary mirrors aboard the JWST.

The process involves heating the gold until the point where it is vaporized. It then condenses on the beryllium panel in a layer about 1/1000th the width of a human hair — smaller than a flu virus.

How much gold is required to coat JWST’s 18 primary mirror segments totaling 25 square meters (269 square feet)? Only 48.25 grams, about the size of a golf ball.

How much gold is required to coat the this year’s Oscars? Mathematician Oscar Fernandez, author of "Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All Around Us," calculated the surface area of the statuette to figure it out.

The 50 awards manufactured each year for presentation on the big night have a total surface area of 10.2 square meters (109.6 square feet). Oscars' suit of gold is about 3.8 times as thick as JWST’s, requiring 74.9 grams (2.6 oz) of 24 karat gold — almost 1.5 times the amount used to coat the spacecraft's mirrors.