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we're here at the jet propulsion

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laboratory in pasadena california home

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of mars rovers

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but it turns out the folks working here

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are doing a lot more than that

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and i just happen to have here dr mike

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ressler he is a

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miri project scientist mary project

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scientist a mouthful

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what do you do in a nutshell so miri is

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an instrument that will fly on the james

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webb space telescope

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and it's sensitive to infrared light

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rather than visible wavelengths

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so we can see the heat from astronomical

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sources rather than

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the visible light that you see when if

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you look through a telescope with your

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eyes

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you are in charge of the production of

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the detectors

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are the sensors

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so if you have a digital camera there's

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a little electronic chip

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in the heart of the camera and that's

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the sensor it's what

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gathers the light from the lenses and

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converts it into a picture that you can

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look at in your computer later on

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so the instrument that we're working on

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does exactly the same thing let's take a

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look at it

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and i think we have to get into bunny

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suits is that right

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so much for getting my hair done today

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one size fits all

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we have a light source basically a very

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sophisticated little light bulb

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that's mounted in our test setup that's

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shining on the detector

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and the detector is collecting light in

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steps we can see that

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the detector is indeed very sensitive uh

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it responds very well to light

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by where it saturates we can tell how

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bright a star will be able to look at

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once

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the bright spots are bright because

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they're supposed no bad pixels no hot

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pixels you know everything's just as it

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the detectors go through environmental

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tests

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they're shaken and chilled to make sure

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they survive

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so now it's time to do a final

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inspection of the unit to make sure

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nothing's happened to it while we were

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doing the testing

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so we want to check it to make sure that

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nobody accidentally got a fingerprint on

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it

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we want to make sure there are no broken

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wires or other damage to the unit

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we want to make sure everything is just

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fine so we're really wrapping up and

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we're able to say this module is fully

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qualified and ready to go

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the mid-infrared instrument or miri has

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three detectors

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all of which have to be precisely

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aligned with each other

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to within half the width of a human hair