Solutions

Mission

Inspired by the success of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have collaborated since 1996 on the design and construction of a scientifically worthy successor. Due to be launched in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to have as profound and far-reaching an impact on astrophysics as did its famous predecessor.

The primary aim is to examine the first light in the Universe – those objects which formed shortly after the Big Bang and thus understand the formation of galaxies, stars, planets, and ultimately life. Further aims include: looking at how galaxies form and evolve, studying the birth of stars and planets, looking at our own Solar System, and studying the properties of exoplanets.

JWST will be launched on an Ariane 5 ECA rocket. After travelling on a transfer trajectory, the observatory will operate approximately 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, in an orbit around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2. With the aid of a tennis-court-sized deployable sunshield the 6.5-m JWST telescope will be kept in perpetual shadow. This allows the telescope and the instruments to cool to the extremely low temperature of -233 °C (40K) required to keep the instrument’s own infrared emission from overwhelming the signals from the astronomical targets.

OIP’s Participation

OIP, as a subcontractor to Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL, B), was responsible for the mechanical design, manufacturing and AIV of the IOC during phase C/D. The starting point of the OIP activities was the STM design (made by the university of Leicester (UK) in cooperation with CSL), which had to be made “manufacturable”, compatible with space environment and with the latest mirror design.

The STM design was upgraded into first a Verification Model (VM), for interface checks, later on into an Engineering Test Model (ETM) for qualification testing and finally a (proto-) Flight Model (pFM). OIP was not responsible for the mirror design and development (AMOS/CSL).

Status

Phase C/D kicked-off in January 2006, finally the proto-flight model (pFM) of MIRI-IOC was ready and delivered to CSL in January 2010.

CSL completed the (environmental) test campaign throughout 2010, to have a successful Delivery Review Board and acceptance in October 2010. MIRI-IOC was delivered from CSL to Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL, UK) in 2011, where the integration into MIRI was completed.

MIRI became the first JWST payload to be delivered to NASA’s Goddard Flight Space Center (GSFC) on May 9th, 2012.
All 4 science instruments have been integrated in the Integrated Science Instruments Module (ISIM) and completed environmental testing. Currently the ‘telescope’ is made ready for flight. Launch is scheduled in 2021.

Note: The JWST project was suffering from huge budget/cost overruns. In the end, president Obama granted the full budget to the JWST project, aiming for a launch in 2018 (→2021). This decision had direct implications for NASA’s participation in the Exomars programme. The NASA participation was cancelled and the Exomars consortium needed to be restructured.

Partners

MIRI is being developed as a partnership between Europe and the USA. The main partners are ESA, an European Consortium of nationally funded European institutes, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

In Belgium, the Centre Spatial de Liege (CSL, B) led the built of the instrument control electronics (ICE) box, the Double Prism, the Phase Mask and the Interface Optics and Calibration (IOC) unit.

OIP , as a subcontractor to CSL, was responsible for the design and development of the IOC structure.
The project was funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office BELSPO through the ESA/PRODEX programme.