James Webb Telescope moves further towards completion

Essentially acting as Webb’s eye, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), contains a camera, medium-resolution integral field spectrograph and coronagraphs and it covers the wavelength range of 5 to 28 microns. 

It will be placed much further from the Earth than Hubble — around 1.5 million km away at the Larange point, where the combined gravitational pull of the earth and sun will keep it in a solar orbit. 

Crucially though, it will be too far away for emergency maintenance missions, as was required with Hubble.

‘All of the testing and verification programmes have to be so rigorous because there’s no chance of servicing and fixing anything if it were to go wrong,’ said Paul Eccleston, project lead of the Assembly, Integration and Test (AIT) arm of MIRI.

STFC is leading the European team that is developing MIRI in a partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The recent testing is the culmination of more than 2,000 individual tests by the respective partner institutions on the different components.