“The largest space observatory in history will have an ultra-cool camera on board: the MIRI instrument.” That wrote the NASA recently on the Twitter account of his own Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Leave it to the Americans to draw attention to their scientific projects and inform the wider public about them in an appealing way. However, it would have been close if the Mid-Infrared Instrument with that extremely cooled camera hadn’t come to fruition.
James Webb has become a very expensive project. It was once budgeted on a $1 billion budget, but will eventually cost ten times that. Logically, questions are asked about the costs: does it have to be so expensive and complex? Does James Webb really need those four scientific instruments, namely the Near-Infrared Camera, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, and the Fine Guidance Sensor/Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph? Years ago, the US mainly focused on MIRI. A beautiful instrument, but is it really more than ‘nice to have’? Ultimately, the MIRI instrument has simply become part of the James Webb telescope.
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