Over the past few days, NASA has released stunning photographs of nebulae, clusters of galaxies, and even the “deepest” view of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, the agency has posted pictures of something much closer to home than everyone’s favorite new telescope – sorry, Hubble! He captured. When James Webb’s team was calibrating the instrument, members took photos of Jupiter to see if it could be used to observe nearby celestial objects such as moons and asteroids, as well as other elements such as rings of planets and satellites. The answer is yes.
A photo taken by the shortwave filter of the telescope’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) instrument (above) clearly shows the different bands of the gas giant and its moon Europa. The Great Red Spot is also perfectly visible, although it appears white due to the way the image was processed. When the 2.12 micron filter of the NIRCam instrument was used, the resulting image showed the Jovian moons Europa, Teba, Metis and even the shadow of Europe near the Great Red Spot. And when the team used NIRCam’s 3.23 micron filter, the resulting image captured some of Jupiter’s rings, as you can see below:
James Webb
Bryan Holler, one of the scientists who helped plan these observations, said:
“Combined with deep-field images released the other day, these images of Jupiter demonstrate a full understanding of what Webb can observe, from the lightest, most distant observable galaxies to the planets in our own cosmic courtyard that you can see with your own eyes. naked from your real backyard “.
It is worth noting that James Webb captured these images by moving through his field of view in three separate observations, proving that he is able to find and track stars in the vicinity of a celestial body as bright as Jupiter. This means that it can be used to study the moons of our solar system and could give us the first images of plumes of material known to emit from natural satellites such as Europe and Saturn’s Enceladus moon.
The team also tracked the asteroids in the asteroid belt to find out the fastest objects it can observe. They discovered that it can still obtain data from objects moving up to 67 milliseconds of arc per second through its field of view. NASA says this is equivalent to tracking a turtle that moves from a mile away. As Stefanie Milam, an assistant scientist on James Webb’s project, said, these images show that “everything worked brilliantly.” We can expect not only images of space with more impressive details in the future, but also information that could shed more light on how the first galaxies had formed.