James Webb Space Telescope captures its first pictures of Mars

Infrared images of Mars taken by the James Webb Space Telescope could assistance america amended recognize its atmosphere

Space 19 September 2022

By Alex Wilkins

Left: Existing representation of Mars. Top right: Infrared representation of the aforesaid country revealing aboveground features specified arsenic craters and particulate layers. Bottom right: Infrared representation showing somesthesia connected Mars

NASA/ESA/CSA/STcI/MARS JWST/GTO team

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released its archetypal images of Mars, capturing atmospheric information for the full satellite that volition assistance astronomers place phenomena and gases that erstwhile instruments couldn’t.

“Now you tin really get these afloat images of the satellite successful the full infrared scope astatine unthinkable sensitivities,” says Geronimo Villanueva astatine the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center successful Maryland.

JWST’s images amusement the eastbound hemisphere of Mars successful 2 antithetic infrared wavelengths. The shorter wavelength (top right, above) is simply a effect of reflected sunlight, revealing aboveground features often seen successful visible-light images, portion the longer wavelength representation reveals accusation astir vigor emitted from the Martian aboveground and atmosphere, arsenic good arsenic the concentrations of c dioxide successful the ambiance (bottom right, above).

Imaging adjacent planets similar Mars is hard for an instrumentality similar JWST, which was designed to observe precise distant, faint objects. The sunlight reflected from Mars overloads JWST’s detectors, truthful Villanueva and his squad had to accommodate by taking abbreviated exposures and lone sampling immoderate of the airy from the detectors.

Mars was particularly tricky to seizure due to the fact that it moves comparatively rapidly astir the star system, whereas JWST typically images objects that hardly determination comparative to different stars. “The information that, erstwhile we opened the images and erstwhile we got the spectra, we really could get the information and they were bully data, it was exciting,” says squad subordinate Sara Faggi.

The archetypal images and spectra of Mars from JWST haven’t revealed thing we didn’t already cognize astir the planet, identifying dust, aboveground rocks and atmospheric features similar h2o and c dioxide, but they bash service arsenic a impervious of conception for collecting information that different telescopes can’t.

One vantage of utilizing JWST, is that an full look of the satellite tin beryllium imaged astatine erstwhile successful precocious solution astatine a abbreviated vulnerability time, which should let for the survey of events that hap implicit a abbreviated timescale, similar particulate storms, upwind patterns and seasonal changes.

This afloat representation volition besides let scientists to much easy way down the sources of immoderate hint gases that they spot. “Hunting for these peculiar [chemical] taxon and, eventually, identifying the sources of these taxon is simply a enactment that tin beryllium done successful a overmuch much promising mode with JWST,” says squad subordinate Giuliano Liuzzi.

These hint gases, similar methane oregon hydrogen chloride, beryllium successful precise tiny quantities successful Mars’ atmosphere, and are important for identifying imaginable biologic oregon geological processes. Previous missions that person measured hint gases astir Mars person utilized orbiters, which tin lone instrumentality snapshots of tiny areas of the planet.

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• Mars
• James Webb abstraction telescope