Science & Exploration

Notes for Editors

09/05/2012 693 views 0 likes

ESA / Science & Exploration / Space Science

The James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. It is scheduled for launch in 2018 and will carry four scientific instruments: the MIRI mid-infrared camera and spectrograph, the NIRSpec near-infrared spectrograph, the NIRCam near-infrared camera, and the FGS-NIRISS combined fine guidance sensor and near-infrared imager and slitless spectrograph.

MIRI was developed as a partnership between Europe and the USA. The main partners are ESA, a consortium of nationally funded European institutes, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The European consortium designed, built and tested the optical capabilities of the instrument, while the MIRI team at JPL supplied the detector system, software and the associated cryogenic cooling system. The latter is currently under development and will be delivered at a later date.

The European consortium comprises: Astronomy Technology Centre, UK; Astron, Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, Netherlands; CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), UK; CEA Service d’Astrophysique, Saclay, France; Centre Spatial de Liège, Belgium; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain; Danish Space Research Institute (DSRI), Denmark; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Ireland; EADS Astrium Ltd, UK; Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), Orsay, France; Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA), Spain; Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), France; Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA), Germany; Observatoire de Paris, France; Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland; University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; University of Cologne, Germany; University of Leicester, UK; University of Leiden, Netherlands; University of Leuven, Belgium; and University of Stockholm, Sweden.