Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)

24 March 2004

The Infrared Multilayer Laboratory has recently been awarded a prestigious contract to design and develop a set of mid infrared optical filters for the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

MIRI is a cooled thermal-infrared imager (9 K) and medium resolution spectrometer (7 K) being developed for launch on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by a NASA-led international consortium comprising the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, European partners sponsored by the European Space Agency, and an international science team. MIRI is one of three instruments on the JWST being designed to address many astrophysical topics, ranging from the understanding of the structure of the universe to the birth and formation of stars.

The Infrared Multilayer Laboratory is responsible for the design and fabrication of long-wave pass dichroic beam splitters in the spectrometer subsystem (5–29 µm), together with a set of precision bandpass filters (13–29 µm), and coronagraphic filters (15.5 and 23 µm) for the wide-field imaging camera.