NASA Team Award for JWST Commissioning

Members of the Exoplanet and Habitability Group, Adrian Glauser and Polychronis Patapis, were awarded the Silver Group Achievement Award by NASA for their contribution to the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

JWST was launched in 2021 after a 25-year development with international contributions by NASA, ESA, and CSA. For the first 6 months after launch the observatory deployed in space reached its destination at the Lagrange point 2 (L2), cooled down, and underwent an extensive campaign to verify its performance. The instrument teams monitored each science instrument, and multiple observations of stars and nebulas were obtained and analyzed to derive crucial instrument characterization metrics and calibrations.

The ETH team is part of the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) team, having contributed to hardware development, instrument testing and calibration. During commissioning they took part in shift duty, monitoring the instrument's health and preparing the execution of observations. Focused mainly on the Medium Resolution Spectrometer of MIRI, they led multiple work packages to verify the performance and prepare the data processing pipeline for science observations.

With around 500 people involved in the commissioning of JWST and 20,000 scientists and engineers contributing to the overall mission, the new infrared observatory has already produced spectacular results in all areas of astrophysics.