Measure thermal noise? The amount of information contained in the black body radiation of a warm (well, really cold, but not cold enough) object must be absolutely immense, at least when you care about a signal at the level of single photons. Trying to capture it with sensors is futile. Sure you can try to do some noise suppression with a simplified model/probability distribution, but that won't work well if your signal to noise ratio is 0.00001.

That would be like throwing a beam of a light from a powerful flashlight 10 cm away from his face when he watches night scenes from last season of Game of Thrones, and saying ”just ignore these 1000 lumens, tell me what is happening?”

Sensors that can measure the heat will themselves be putting out their own heat. The scientists who built this thing are pros.