NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars Sept. 5
What James Telescope do?
Telescope provides a unique perspective with its infrared sensitivity on our neighboring planet, complementing data being collected by orbiters, rovers, and other telescopes.
What James Telescope do?
Webb can capture images and spectra with the spectral resolution needed to study short-term phenomena like dust storms, weather patterns, seasonal changes, and, in a single observation, processes that occur at different times (daytime, sunset, and nighttime) of a Martian day.
What James Telescope do?
Webb’s first images of Mars, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), show a region of the planet’s eastern hemisphere at two different wavelengths, or colors of infrared light.
What we see in this image?
Image Source: NASA Twitter
This image shows a surface reference map from NASA and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the left, with the two Webb NIRCam instrument field of views overlaid. The near-infrared images from Webb are on shown on the right.
What we see in this image?
Taken by the telescope’s NIRCam, this “heat map” shows ~4.3-micron light being given off as heat is lost on Mars. Darker, cooler regions, like Mars’ poles and northern hemisphere, are represented by purple and red. Orange and yellow represent brighter, warmer regions.
What we see in this image?
This poses special challenges to the observatory, which was built to detect the extremely faint light of the most distant galaxies in the universe.