Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award for JWST-MIRI Team

Britain's Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has presented the 2024 Group Achievement Award to the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI team, both for building the instrument and for the impressive scientific results achieved since its launch in 2021.

MIRI is the Mid-Infrared Instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. The project is a collaboration between ten European countries and the US. Prof. Karina Caputi and Prof. Inga Kamp of the Kapteyn Institute are part of the MIRI European team as co-I’s. Prof. Jan Willem Pel of the Kapteyn institute worked on MIRI instrumentation.

The instrument is orders of magnitude more sensitive than its predecessors and looks into space much more clearly. This allows it to see small faint objects: from the first galaxies in the distant universe to new worlds close to home.

See also the ESA news item.