James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) has both a camera and a spectrograph that sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, with wavelengths that are longer than our eyes see. MIRI covers the wavelength range of 5 to 28.5 microns. Its sensitive detectors will allow it to see the redshifted light of distant galaxies, helping identify the first galaxies in the universe, observe newly forming stars by peering inside dust-shrouded stellar nurseries, and analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets for markers of potential life. MIRI's camera will provide wide-field, broadband imaging that will return breathtaking astrophotography. MIRI was built by the MIRI Consortium (a group that consists of scientists and engineers from European countries), a team from the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, and scientists from several U.S. institutions. — NASA — The Webb Telescope Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:01MIRI is one of the four instruments on board the James Webb Space Telescope. It's the one instrument on board the telescope that will be observing at mid-infrared wavelengths. The other instruments focus on the near infrared part of the spectrum. NIRSPEC, NIRCAM and the FGS, they work at wavelengths from about 1 to 4 or 5 microns. Now MIRI is unique on the James Web because it operates at even longer wavelengths than that. So we start at 5 microns and we keep going out to 25-30 microns. MIRI is actually quite a complex instrument it has several different observing modes on board in the instruments so we have a camera that just takes images in lots of different filters across the mid-infrared wavelength range, we also have spectroscopic modes so we
0:53have a low-resolution spectroscopy and we also have a medium resolution integral field spectrograph. When you look inside our own galaxy, you can see dusty regions and there's things going on inside those clouds, inside the dust that you can't see because dust is essentially opaque. If you move out to longer wavelengths, out into the infrared, the opacity, you know, the amount of light that is absorbed by that dust drops and so we can see not just the surface but into the heart of dusty region That means we can see to the centre of our own galaxy more easily. We can see inside dusty regions where stars are being formed and see what's really going on when a star is formed in space. We're really going to be able to address a huge range of science questions.
1:38MIRI is going to probe even further back into the history of the Universe. It's going to study the atmospheres of planets around other stars and really be able to kind of search for the signatures of molecules in those atmospheres. Those are just a few of the highest profile science goals that we hope to achieve with MIRI.
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