COOL! James Webb Space Telescope Just Revealed NEW Update...!

Hi, and welcome back to Great SpaceX! This just in, Webb's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature. With help from a cryo-cooler, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, has dropped down to just a few degrees above the lowest temperature that matter can reach and is ready for calibration. So, what's next? And I can't wait to give you all of the latest updates and changes. Okay, let's dive right in! The 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. And on April 7th, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument, a joint development by ESA and NASA, reached its final operating temperature below 7 kelvins, or negative 266 degrees Celsius. Gillian Wright, European Principal Investigator for MIRI and Director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, or ATC, just shared that, I am delighted that after so many years of hard work by the MIRI team, the instrument is now cold and ready for the next steps. That the cooler worked so well is a major achievement for the mission. Along with Webb's three other instruments, MIRI initially cooled off in the shade of Webb's tennis court-sized sunshield, dropping to about 90 kelvins. But dropping to less than 7 kelvins required an electrically powered cryo-cooler. Last week, the team passed a particularly challenging milestone called the pinch point, when the instrument goes from 15 kelvins to 6.4 kelvins. As Annalyn Schneider, Project Manager for MIRI at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in SoCal, USA, said, The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point. 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. Sorry for the dog. But why so cold? That's because the low temperature is necessary for all four of Webb's instruments to detect infrared light, wavelengths slightly longer than those that the 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 detectors for all four instruments 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. Will the real infrared signal please stand up? No? Okay. Cool. Anyway. 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 signs 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 cryo-cooler, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which oversaw the integration of MIRI and the cooler to the rest of the observatory. Mike Ressler, project scientist for MIRI at JPL, revealed that they spent years practicing for that moment. Running through the commands and the checks that we did on MIRI when the test data rolled in, I was ecstatic to see it looked exactly as expected and that we have a healthy instrument. However, there are still some challenges left 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. Alastair Glass, MIRI instrument scientist at the ATC in Edinburgh, Scotland, revealed that this period is their trial by fire. But the personal bonds and mutual respect built up over the past years between Europe and the USA is quote-unquote what will get us through the next few months to deliver a fantastic instrument to the worldwide astronomy community, end quote. But besides that, Klaus Pontapidon, the Space Telescope Science Institute project scientist for Webb, I'm sorry if I butchered that name, has just shared the cool science planned for star and planet formation with Webb. As he said, In the first year of science operations, we expect Webb to write entirely new chapters in the history of our origins, the formation of stars and planets. It's the study of star and planet formation with Webb that allows us to connect observations of mature exoplanets to their birth environments and our solar system to its own origins. All of this is based on Webb's infrared capabilities. We often hear that infrared light passes through obscuring dust, revealing newborn stars and planets that are still embedded in their parental clouds. In fact, mid-infrared light, as seen by MIRI, can pass through 20 times thicker clouds than visible light. Because young stars are formed quickly, by cosmic standards anyway, in as little as few hundred thousand years, their natal clouds have not had time to disperse. Hiding what is going on in this critical stage from visible view, Webb's infrared sensitivity allows us to understand what happens at these very first stages as gas and dust are actively collapsing to form new stars. Moreover, Webb also is great at picking up the heat signatures to detect new young stars and planets and can help us understand the physics of their earliest evolution. Furthermore, Webb's infrared range, sometimes called the molecular fingerprint region, is ideal for identifying the presence of a range of chemicals, in particular water and various organics. All four of Webb's science instruments can detect various important molecules using their spectroscopic modes. They are particularly sensitive to molecular ices present in cold molecular clouds and NIRCAM, as well as NIRSPEC, will, for the first time, comprehensively map the spatial distribution of ice to help us understand their chemistry. MIRI will also observe warm molecular gas near many young stars where rocky, potentially habitable planets may be forming. These observations will be sensitive to most bulk molecules and will allow us to develop a chemical census at the earliest stages of planet formation. It's no surprise that a significant number of Webb's early scientific investigations aim to measure how planetary systems build the molecules that may be important for the emergence of life as we know it. If you enjoy what my team and I are doing, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. And as a quick note, if you have advertising needs, you can contact us directly via email. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with Great SpaceX. That's all for today, but we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks again for tuning in and have a great day.