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After the Orion Nebula and the Tarantula Nebula, the James Webb space telescope has focused its mirrors on a much closer target. The latest images that have been disseminated by ESA, NASA and CSA (the three space agencies involved) concern in fact Mars. Several missions are active on the Red Planet, including orbiter, lander, rover and a drone, but new data always allow for further information that can be used for increasingly precise studies.
The JWST he had already observed another planet on more than one occasion, but in those cases it was Jupiter (and its moons) both for scientific reasons but also to complete the calibration of the on-board systems during commissioning. Thanks to the potential of its scientific instruments and its structure, the new space telescope can capture a lot of information about in infrared frequencies Marsincluding storms and other transient phenomena with a single observation, even when it comes to changes that occur between day and night.
The James Webb Space Telescope is observing Mars for the first time
According to as reported from ESA, please observe Mars for the JWST is a demanding challenge not because it is too weak, but for the opposite reason: being (relatively) close, its emission is high enough to reach the “detector saturation” for a telescope designed to be able to capture images and spectra of much fainter objects.
The images of the Red Planet were captured using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) with two different types of infrared emission. In particular, the planet was observed at 2.1 µm which is the closest frequency to the visible spectrum. We then moved on to that at 4.3 µm which instead shows the thermal emission of Mars, both of the surface and of the atmosphere. Here you can see the difference between the equator and the poles, with the Martian North Pole being colder as it is in the winter period. Carbon dioxide also has an effect on this filter and on the detection and part of the emission is captured by this molecule.
It was also used too NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) del James Webb space telescope to detect the spectrum as well. The ultimate goal is to be able to detect traces of compounds such as methane And hydrochloric acid which will help define the constitution of the atmosphere of Mars and its variability with the changing seasons and hours of the day even if you can already see the “ghostly footprints” icy clouds, Martian dust and different types of rock. In general the first analyzes show a greater difference in the observations of NIRCam compared to those of NIRSpec but the data will still have to be evaluated as a whole.
According to a new communication plan, the agencies are expected to release new information each week on the research carried out by the James Webb space telescope and these will also be joined by the studies that will be published in the coming months or years. Users, even if they are simply curious, will therefore be able to have much more and more and more accessible information on the work done by the new scientific instrument.
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