The James Webb Telescope can take detailed pictures of the planets and moons of our solar system

Over the past few days, NASA has released stunning images of nebulaeand galaxy clusters and even A “deeper” view of the universe Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, the agency has released images of something much closer to home like everyone’s new favorite telescope — sorry, Hubble! – taken over. When James Webb’s team was calibrating the machine, the members Take pictures of Jupiter To see if it can be used to observe nearby celestial bodies such as moons and asteroids, as well as other elements such as rings of planets and satellites. It turns out that the answer is yes.

An image captured by the NIRCam’s Near Infrared Camera Telescope Instrument (NIRCam) short-wavelength filter (above) clearly shows the distinct bands of the gas giant and its moon Europa. The great red dot is also quite visible, although it appears to be white due to the way the image was processed. When the NIRCam instrument’s 2.12-micron filter was used, the resulting image showed the Jovian moons Europa, Thebe, Metis, and even Europa’s shadow near the Great Red Spot. And when the team used a 3.23-micron NIRCam filter, the resulting image captured some of Jupiter’s rings, as you can see below:

Brian Holler, one of the scientists who helped plan these observations, said:

Combined with the deep field images released the other day, these images show Jupiter a full understanding of what Webb can observe, from faint and distant observable galaxies to planets in our cosmic backyard that you can see with the naked eye from your actual private backyard. your”.

It is worth noting that James Webb captured these images moving across his field of view in three separate observations, proving that he was able to find and track stars in the vicinity of a bright celestial body like Jupiter. This means that it can be used to study moons in our solar system and could give us the first images of plumes of material known to be emitted by natural satellites such as Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

The team also tracked asteroids in the asteroid belt to find out the fastest things to see. They found that it could still obtain aggregate data from objects moving at up to 67 milliseconds per second through their field of view. NASA says this is the equivalent of tracking a turtle’s movement from a mile away. As Stephanie Milam, James Webb’s Deputy Project Scientist put it, these photos show that “everything went brilliantly”. We can expect not only more impressive detailed images of space in the future, but also information that could shed more light on how the first galaxies formed.