NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will see the first galaxies to form after
the Big Bang, but to do that, its instruments first need to get cold—really
cold. On April 7, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)—a joint development
by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency)—reached its final operating
temperature below 7 kelvins (minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 266
degrees Celsius).
Along with Webb's three other instruments, MIRI initially cooled off in the
shade of Webb's tennis-court-size sunshield, dropping to about 90 kelvins
(minus 298 F, or minus 183 C). But dropping to less than 7 kelvins required
an electrically powered cryocooler. Last week, the team passed a
particularly challenging milestone called the "pinch point," when the
instrument goes from 15 kelvins (minus 433 F, or minus 258 C) to 6.4 kelvins
(minus 448 F, or minus 267 C).
"The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the
procedure for the pinch point," said Analyn Schneider, project manager for
MIRI at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "The team
was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end it
was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is
even better than expected."
The low temperature is necessary because all four of Webb's instruments
detect infrared light—wavelengths slightly longer than those that human eyes
can see. Distant galaxies, stars hidden in cocoons of dust, and planets
outside our solar system all emit infrared light. But so do other warm
objects, including Webb's own electronics and optics hardware. Cooling down
the four instruments' detectors and the surrounding hardware suppresses
those infrared emissions. MIRI detects longer infrared wavelengths than the
other three instruments, which means it needs to be even colder.
Another reason Webb's detectors need to be cold is to suppress something
called dark current, or electric current created by the vibration of atoms
in the detectors themselves. Dark current mimics a true signal in the
detectors, giving the false impression that they have been hit by light from
an external source. Those false signals can drown out the real signals
astronomers want to find. Since temperature is a measurement of how fast the
atoms in the detector are vibrating, reducing the temperature means less
vibration, which in turn means less dark current.
MIRI's ability to detect longer infrared wavelengths also makes it more
sensitive to dark current, so it needs to be colder than the other
instruments to fully remove that effect. For every degree the instrument
temperature goes up, the dark current goes up by a factor of about 10.
Once MIRI reached a frigid 6.4 kelvins, scientists began a series of checks
to make sure the detectors were operating as expected. Like a doctor
searching for any sign of illness, the MIRI team looks at data describing
the instrument's health, then gives the instrument a series of commands to
see if it can execute tasks correctly. This milestone is the culmination of
work by scientists and engineers at multiple institutions in addition to
JPL, including Northrop Grumman, which built the cryocooler, and NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, which oversaw the integration of MIRI and the
cooler to the rest of the observatory.
"We spent years practicing for that moment, running through the commands and
the checks that we did on MIRI," said Mike Ressler, project scientist for
MIRI at JPL. "It was kind of like a movie script: Everything we were
supposed to do was written down and rehearsed. When the test data rolled in,
I was ecstatic to see it looked exactly as expected and that we have a
healthy instrument."
There are still more challenges that the team will have to face before MIRI
can start its scientific mission. Now that the instrument is at operating
temperature, team members will take test images of stars and other known
objects that can be used for calibration and to check the instrument's
operations and functionality. The team will conduct these preparations
alongside calibration of the other three instruments, delivering Webb's
first science images this summer.
"I am immensely proud to be part of this group of highly motivated,
enthusiastic scientists and engineers drawn from across Europe and the
U.S.," said Alistair Glasse, MIRI instrument scientist at the UK Astronomy
Technology Centre (ATC) in Edinburgh, Scotland. "This period is our 'trial
by fire' but it is already clear to me that the personal bonds and mutual
respect that we have built up over the past years is what will get us
through the next few months to deliver a fantastic instrument to the
worldwide astronomy community."
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