James Webb Space Telescope takes its first photographs and spectra of Mars

The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first photographs and infrared spectrum of Mars. The Webb telescope captured its first photographs and spectra of the crimson planet on September 5, 2022.

Webb is located roughly 1.5 million kilometres away from our planet on the second Sun-Earth Lagrange level (L2). From the telescope’s vantage level, it will get a view of Mars’ observable disk, which is the portion of the sunlit aspect dealing with the telescope. This permits JWST to seize photographs and spectra with the particular decision wanted to check short-term phenomena. These phenomena embrace mud storms, climate patterns, and seasonal modifications.

While this may increasingly not sound spectacular for a telescope that’s designed to detect distant faint objects, it really is. Mars may be very near the Earth and it is likely one of the brightest objects within the evening sky, in each seen and infrared gentle. But since Webb’s devices are so delicate, the intense infrared gentle from Mars is sort of blinding, inflicting one thing referred to as “detector saturation.”

Scientists want to make use of particular detection strategies as a way to overcome this, together with utilizing very quick exposures and measuring solely among the gentle that hits the detectors. They then used particular knowledge evaluation strategies to reach on the picture.

JWST’s first photographs of Mars had been captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and exhibits part of the planet’s japanese hemisphere at two completely different wavelengths. The picture above incorporates a floor reference map taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor on the left and two Webb NIRCam instrument fields overlaid on the correct.

Spectrum knowledge of Mars captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit score: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Mars JWST/GTO staff)

The Webb photographs of Mars present variations in brightness over a lot of wavelengths from place to put throughout the planet at a specific date and time. But the spectrum illustrates the delicate variations in brightness between lots of of various wavelengths that characterize the planet as a complete. Astronomers will analyse options of the spectrum to collect extra details about the floor and ambiance of the planet.