New images from the James Webb Space Telescope: Jupiter and an asteroid

Over the past few days the Web has been “flooded” from the beauty of the images released by James Webb space telescope. As we know, however, this is only the beginning of what awaits us for the next five years (duration of the primary mission) or ten years (expected duration of the extended mission). This scientific instrument will open new horizons in a Universe full of secrets and discoveries yet to be made and phenomena to be understood.

Among the first targets were the Carina NebulaL’exoplanet WASP-96 b, NGC 3132 (Southern Ring Nebula), the Stephan’s Quintet And SMACS 0723 (with the latter being the first image shown). As scientists and users got lost in the details of these new images and the released data, the first images of an object within the Solar System were also shown: Jupiter. In this case, these are engineering images designed to understand the actual performance of JWST.

The new James Webb space telescope images

In the past few hours the NASA has released more images of Jupiter and the spectra of some asteroids, while their characteristics were explained in a post on the official blog. As stated, we now officially know that the JWST can track objects in the Solar system and detect unprecedented data.

Click on the image to enlarge it to the maximum resolution

NIRCam is the tool of James Webb space telescope which was used to detect the infrared characteristics of the gas giant. You can see common characteristics such as the horizontal bands that characterize the atmosphere as well as the Great Red Spot which shines in a lighter color.

There were also some of the moons of Jupiterhow Europe (visible on the left) while its shadow is present to the left of the Great Red Spot. In the images, as shown above, Thebes and Metis (other moons) can be seen. The James Webb space telescopein addition to observing Space far from the Earth at over 13 billion light years, it will also be able to try to capture the plumes of material that emerge from Europa or Enceladus (Saturn’s moon).

The capabilities of JWST they surprised even the scientists themselves, with John Stansberry (of the STScI) who stated “The images of Jupiter in the narrowband filters were designed to provide beautiful images of the entire disk of the planet, but the wealth of additional information on very faint objects (Metis, Thebes, the main ring, haze) in those images with approximately one minute exposure was absolutely a pleasant surprise “.

As mentioned in the previous news, the important news is actually related to the engineering part and now we know that the space telescope it can track stars that are close to bright objects such as Jupiter. To better understand the performance, theasteroid 6481 Tenzing which is located between Mars and Jupiter to have a moving target. The performance you have come to expect from JWST were to be able to follow objects moving at 30 mas / s while the performance reached up to 67 mas / s.

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