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MIRI on a Jetplane

May 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Last week, I said a little goodbye to MIRI. In a UK Space Agency-sponsored swanky bash in central London, the MIRI team got the official confirmation that the instrument is cleared for shipping to our NASA colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where it will be prepared for integration with the spacecraft that will carry the James Webb Space Telescope into space.

It was a day of looking back, ceremony and celebration, rather than schedules and problem-solving, for the benefit of the various officials from space and funding agencies and the media. In the afternoon, we heard a speech from the UK Science Minister David Willetts, and I particularly enjoyed the talk by Mark McCaughrean of ESA, about making dreams come true. Yes, there was some cheesiness, but you know, once in a while you have to chuck out the hard-nosed cynicism and make time for that.

There was some nice media coverage, particularly from the BBC. Here’s an interview with Eric Smith, the deputy programme director for JWST at NASA, Jonathan Amos visiting MIRI and RAL, and another longer article + video from Amos. Will Gater also vsited RAL and produced this nice video for the Sky at Night Magazine.

People always ask me whether this is now the end for the European involvement in MIRI, and of course it isn’t. There’s a lot of work still to be done once MIRI is in the US – it will need to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft, which means more testing up ahead. There’s software to be developed and calibration products to be delivered. As most MIRI expertise is currently in Europe, the European team has an important, if supporting, role to play in all that. It also means that we’re not quite done yet with MIRI meetings, and I’m looking forward to more time with the team I’ve so enjoyed working with these last 5 years.

Unusually for me, I brought my own camera and took some pictures of the proceedings for my own memory box. I thought I’d share a few of the ones that came out nicely.

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MIRI is ready to go

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Image: STFC

It’s been a busy few months for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, since we had our Acceptance Review at the start of the year. The team’s engineers have performed some final tests on the instruments to cross a few final t’s, dot the last i’s, both in Europe on the actual flight hardware and on spare parts over in the US.

My fellow test teamers and I are currently working on the calibration procedures for the instruments, or how to get the best scientific information out of the photons hitting the detectors. That should keep us busy for a few more months.

But the big news, fresh in my inbox, is that MIRI has now been officially cleared for shipping and delivery to NASA. This means that the panel charged with examining all our design documentation and test results are satisfied that MIRI is ready to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft.

This is super good news for the whole team.

Of course, the further integration of MIRI won’t happen in a day either, and there’s still a long road ahead for the telescope, the instruments and the whole spacecraft before JWST will be ready for launch.

Next Wednesday we’re having a ‘do in London to present our work and our test results from MIRI to an audience of Big Wigs and Important People. A press conference has been planned so expect some MIRI-related items in the news next week as well (I hope). While I have got a little bit fond of Didcot and the Rutherford Labs after so many trips there, it does add a sense of occasion to have this event in a swanky venue in London.

I’ll be presenting the test results from the instrument’s low resolution spectrograph to round off the performance presentations – saving the best for last, obviously. (I kid, I kid.) See you there!

 

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It’s All Relative

October 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Here's the picture of my pen you wanted to see.

I keep seeing references to relativity around me recently. It occurred to me that it’s a word with lots of different meanings, that is relevant to our lives on so many levels. What is relativity, really? It depends how you look at it.

Since the “discovery” of superluminal neutrino travel was announced, relativity has been a talking point in the media: will Einstein’s theories be proved wrong by these findings? It doesn’t look too likely at the moment. To reiterate, the measurement of the super speedy neutrinos is not “fact” – the OPERA experiment team posted their findings in a paper to the Arxiv to solicit ideas, opinions and follow-up experiments to try and explain their baffling observations. Not everyone turned out in favour of this publication strategy, and I use “publication” in the broadest sense and not in its peer-reviewed, journal-accepted kind, but I think it’s an open, responsible, and engaged approach to take when you’ve run out of ideas.

I think it’s likely that these results will be explained in a way that does not require reprinting thousands of textbooks. But in any case it’s good to remind ourselves that no theory, however firmly established, is above scrutiny. And with the Large Hadron Collider in full swing and some interesting developments in gravity research, our fundamental framework for understanding the physics of the Universe, from the Standard Model of particle physics to General Relativity and the Lambda cold dark matter paradigm, is facing some strong challenges.

Every measurement we make is relative to something – a standard. That standard must be known to a much higher precision that the quantity we’re trying to measure. In the end, most of our basic standards, which we adopt as measurement units, are defined in terms of the most fundamental quantities of nature we know – the speed of light, the energy levels within an atom.

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MIRI: Preparing for Send-Off

September 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

MIRI in all its glory, in RAL Space's clean rooms at STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, 8th November 2010.

This past week I spent a few days in Leiden for a meeting of MIRI’s European Consortium, of which I’m a memebr, and a number of our closest US collaborators from NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of Arizona. Over the summer, we completed our final test campaign for the instrument at the Rutherford Appleton Lab in Didcot.

For 86 days a fully assembled MIRI was held at its chilly operating temperature, 7 Kelvin, inside the cryo-chamber at RAL. During this time, every single wheel and pixel of the instrument got a workout, and with our test equipment, specifically designed to emulate scientific operations on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we got to see the first science-like images from all parts of the instrument, the imager, coronagraph and the spectrographs. Apparently this is the longest a space instrument has ever been tested continuously at cryo temperatures in Europe, prior to delivery.

Some other fun stats: 51 people worked for around 6000 person-hours (I did a measly 80 of those); we produced 6.5 terabytes of data, consisting of 8562 exposures, 2,775,036 detector frames. Those 51 people now have on average 168 exposures to work through – and that’s a conservative estimate, as not all 51 people are involved in the in-depth test analysis.

The completion of the test campaign in early August got some good coverage in the media, which was great to see.

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JWST in The Guardian

July 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

I wrote a little something for the Guardian’s science blogs section on the JWST issues, here it is. I really appreciate all the retweets, facebook posts, emails and comments, and it’s been a nice experience to work with the Guardian Science team.

I’m excited that I’ve been able to help with making James Webb something of a talking point here in Europe as well, although I wish the circumstances were different.

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