This week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
The week started with a great whopper of a deadline. The study I’ve worked on for the past 18 months with a large team of Dutch, British, German, Belgian and French scientists and engineers, was due for delivery to ESO. Our instrument, the Mid-infrared E-ELT Imager and Spectrograph, or METIS, was one of eight concepts under study for the European Extremely Large Telescope – each with their own particular scientific scope and technical characteristics. METIS is the only of the eight that, if built, will observe the sky at mid-infrared wavelengths, which gives it a unique scientific niche compared with the other instruments but also some unique difficulties.
Science is not the be all and end all of such processes: when deciding which instruments to provide to the community on the E-ELT, ESO will also consider factors such as the cost, technical risks and the competence of the consortium (and a healthy dose of politics).
Now that our study has been officially delivered, we get a few weeks to catch our breath while a review panel at ESO ploughs through all 860 of our pages. Once they have a feel for what we’ve done, the panel will send us a list of questions, comments, and problems, to which we have a week to respond (cue frantic email activity and daily telecons). The final step is a big review meeting at ESO Towers in Germany, where any remaining open issues can be argued over in person.
By the end of the year, ESO should have announced their chosen location for the E-ELT. Once they have then also picked the first-light instrumentation suite for the new telescope, the project will definitely become a whole lot more real.
At the end of the week, I travelled to Paris to help test some of the flight hardware for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. After over a year of preparatory meetings and mock tests with an engineering model of the instrument, it’s really exciting to get a glimpse of the hardware that will actually be sent into space with the telescope. This was only a subsystem-level test: engineers at CEA Saclay have assembled the instrument’s imager unit, which inludes a coronagraph and a low resolution spectrograph, for preliminary testing. But it’s definitely The Real Thing.
MIRI also has a separate spectrometer unit, with an integral field design to obtain spectra of the entire field of view in one shot. The imager, spectrometer and the remaining optical elements will be brought together at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK in the course of 2010 for a final round of rigorous testing. Every single function of the instrument needs to be checked out, every mechanism will be worked. After that, all the performance aspects of the instrument that it needs to achieve its science goals during the mission, have to be verified. A large team of astronomers and engineers across Europe, me included, will be enlisted in this campaign to make sure all the data are examined in detail and the instrument is working as intended. Once the test campaign has been completed, MIRI will be officially handed over to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in early 2011, and once delivered the instrument is in NASA’s hands until the launch, planned for 2014.
Flight testing seemed like such a long way away when I first started working on this project – time really does fly when you’re having fun. There’s a real sense of “special-ness” in our MIRI meetings, everyone seems genuinely excited to be involved in one of the JWST instruments and the energy of such a big team has certainly kept me inspired these last years. My fingers are seriously crossed that I can bag a ticket to the JWST launch in 2014 (nod, nod, wink, wink).
I posted some pictures to Twitter earlier this week already but I thought I’d put them up again with some annotations. Click to see the full-res versions and enjoy!
The cryostat used for keeping the MIRI module cold during testing.
The window into the cryostat
The optics used to test the MIRI imager (not part of the instrument).
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