From NASA JPL at Caltech: “First Flight Instrument Delivered for James Webb Space Telescope”
“The first of four instruments to fly aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) has been delivered to NASA. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) will allow scientists to study cold and distant objects in greater detail than ever before.
The MIRI Cleanroom Huddle: Although it appears that these six contamination control engineers are in a huddle around the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (or MIRI), they are conducting a receiving inspection. Engineers from the European Space Agency are wearing blue hoods, and engineers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are wearing the white hoods. As part of the standard receiving inspection, they are looking for the tiniest traces of dust or contamination which would have to be remedied because cleanliness is a priority for such a sensitive instrument; MIRI passed its inspection review. Image credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
MIRI arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. on May 29. It has been undergoing inspection before being integrated into Webb’s science instrument payload known as the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM).
Assembled at and shipped from the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, MIRI was developed by a consortium of 10 European institutions and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and delivered by the European Space Agency.
George Rieke, MIRI science team lead at the University of Arizona, Tucson, noted, ‘MIRI is the first Webb instrument to be delivered, the result of teamwork in the U.S. and internationally.’”
See the full article here.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although the facility has a Pasadena postal address, it is actually headquartered in the city of La Cañada Flintridge [1], on the northwest border of Pasadena. JPL is managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Laboratory’s primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating NASA’s Deep Space Network.
