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James Webb Space Telescope’s first pictures of Mars could reveal more about the atmosphere

Posted on September 20, 2022 by Admin

The James Webb Space Telescope is still snapping its first pictures of Solar System planets, and the latest batch could be particularly useful. NASA and the ESA have shared early images of Mars, taken on September 5th, that promise new insights into the planet’s atmosphere. Data from the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) is already offering a few surprises. For starters, the giant Hellas Basin is oddly darker than nearby areas at the hottest time of the day, NASA’s Giuliano Liuzzi and Space.com noted — higher air pressure at the basin’s lower altitude has suppressed thermal emissions.

The JWST imagery also gave space agencies an opportunity to share Mars’ near-infrared atmospheric composition using the telescope’s onboard spectrograph array. The spectroscopic ‘map’ (pictured at middle) shows the planet absorbing carbon dioxide at several different wavelengths, and also shows the presences of carbon monoxide and water. A future research paper will provide more detail about the Martian air’s chemistry.

How did the James Webb Space Telescope record the images perfectly?

Mars atmosphere composition from James Webb Space TelescopeNASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Mars JWST/GTO team. It was particularly tricky to record the images. Mars is one of the brightest objects the James Webb telescope can see — a problem for an observatory designed to study the most distant objects in the universe. Researchers countered this by capturing very short exposures and using special techniques to analyze the findings.

This is only the initial wave of pictures and data. It will take more observations to reveal more about Mars. However, the spectral info already hints at more information about the planet’s materials. Liuzzi also thinks JWST studies could settle disputes over the presence of methane on Mars, potentially signaling that the Red Planet harbored life in its distant past.

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Scientists use William Herschel Telescope to reveal unprecedented details of our galaxy

Posted on August 2, 2022 by Admin

Scientists have supercharged one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes with new technology that will reveal how our galaxy formed in unprecedented detail. The William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma, Spain will be able to survey 1,000 stars per hour until it has catalogued a total of five million.

William Herschel Telescope

A super-fast mapping device linked up to the William Herschel Telescope will analyze the make-up of each star and the speed at which it travels. It will show how our Milky Way galaxy was built up over billions of years.

Prof Gavin Dalton of Oxford University has spent more than a decade developing the instrument, known as ‘Weave’. “It’s a fantastic achievement from a lot of people to make this happen and it’s great to have it working,” he said. “The next step is the new adventure, it’s brilliant!”

Weave instrument: It looks like a large metal disk criss-crossed by fibre-optic tubes pointing at all points of the compass. Robotic arms hover over it.

Weave has been installed on the William Herschel Telescope, which sits high on a mountain top on the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma. The name stands for William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer – and that’s exactly what it does.

It has 80,000 separate parts and is a miracle of engineering.

Identifying Position of thousand stars

For each patch of sky the William Herschel Telescope is pointed at, astronomers identify the positions of a thousand stars. Weave’s nimble robotic fingers then carefully place a fibre-optic – a light-transmitting tube – precisely on each location on a plate, pointing towards its corresponding star.

These fibres are in effect tiny telescopes. Each one captures light from a single star and channels it to another instrument. This then splits it into a rainbow spectrum, which contains the secrets of the star’s origin and history.

All this is completed in just one hour. While this is going on, fibre optics for the next thousand stars are positioned on the reverse side of the plate, which flips over to analyse the next set of targets once the previous survey has been completed.

James Webb Space Telescope Captures First Full-color Images of Space

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Admin

It’s only a few days until NASA and its partners on the James Webb Space Telescope project reveal the first full-color images and spectroscopic data captured by the observatory. The agency has shed a little more light on what to expect by revealing the James Webb Space Telescope’s initial list of cosmic targets.

Captured by James Webb Space Telescope

One of them is the Carina Nebula, which is around 7,600 light-years away. NASA says it’s one of the biggest and brightest nebulae in the sky and it includes stars that are several times larger than the Sun. Another nebula the telescope captured images from is the Southern Ring. That’s roughly 2,000 light-years from Earth and is a planetary nebula — it’s an expanding cloud of gas that surrounds a dying star.

Closer to home is the gas planet WASP-96 b, which is almost 1,150 light-years away and has around half the mass of Jupiter. NASA will provide a look at the planet’s light spectrum data. Much further from here is Stephan’s Quintet, which is around 290 million light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. This is the first compact galaxy group that was discovered, all the way back in 1877. It comprises five galaxies, four of which “are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” NASA said.

Also on Tuesday, NASA, the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency will reveal imagery for SMACS 0723. “Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations,” NASA explained.

Important Step for JWST

A committee of experts from NASA, ESA, CSA and the Space Telescope Science Institute spent five years determining the first targets for Webb’s instruments. The full-color images and spectroscopic data that James Webb Space Telescope captured will be revealed on July 12th at 10:30 AM ET. You’ll be able to view them on NASA’s website.

This marks an important step for James Webb Space Telescope as it marks the official beginning of the observatory’s general science operations. The aim is to provide us with more detailed images and information about the earliest stars and galaxies as well as potentially habitable exoplanets. After launch in December, it took several months for the James Webb Space Telescope to reach its destination and prepare for full operation. We’re very close to finding out just what the observatory is capable of.

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