James Webb Space Telescope - MIRI
The James Webb Space Telescope (also called JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope planned to be the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST is a partner project between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space agency. The launch is planned in 2018. JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, an will see stars forming planetary systems. Webb's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.
JWST will have a large mirror of 6.5 meters in diameter, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. These won't fit into the Ariane 5 launcher so the mirror and the sunshade will be launched folded up, and will be unfolded in orbit.
The telescope will carry three scientific instruments: the Near-Infrared Camera NIRCam, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph NIRSpec built by ESA, and the Mid-infrared Camera and Spectrograph MIRI, built by a UK-lead consortium of European and US research institutes. In Belgium, the Centre Spatial de Liege (CSL) built the instrument control electronics (ICE) box, the Interface Optics and Calibration (IOC) unit, the Double Prism, and the Phase Mask. UGent and KULeuven provided ground support software, instrument testing and characterisation.
The MIRI instrument will operate between wavelengths of 5 to 27 microns, a region that is difficult or impossible to observe from the ground. It consists of two actively cooled subcomponents, an imager and an Integral Field Unit (IFU) spectrograph, and an on-board calibration unit.
The imager provides broad and narrow-band imaging, a coronagraph and low resolution slit spectroscopy (R~100) using a 1024x1024 pixels (Sivas) array. The pixels scale will be 0.1". The integral field spectrograph will provide simultaneous spectral and spatial data on a field of view of 3.6" by 3.6" to about 7.6." by 7.6" with increasing wavelength. The wavelength range it will operate in is 5-27 micron with a spectral resolution of about 3000.
The MIRI team at the institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven is part of the MIRI instrument test team that is responsible for the laboratory tests of the MIRI instrument (Verification Model and Flight Model). Our team members designed, executed and analysed performance tests for the verification model and for the flight model in a series of dedicated test campaigns at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (UK). Full analysis of these data is ongoing.
Our team was also responsible for the MIRI Real Time View (RTV) workstation and software, the EGSE component that allows an on-line data analysis and verification of the success of the tests of the integrated instrument at the test facility of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL). The test team web-based collaboration platform is also hosted at our institute.
People involved
Eva Bauwens, Joris Blommaert, Wim De Meester, Rik Huygen, Bart Vandenbussche, Christoffel Waelkens
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