After dazzling the world with the first images from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope this week, NASA has released more images from the observatory, this time images from inside our solar system. Engineering teams calibrate the observatory’s instruments.
The images are a small order of the images we should get from our solar system in the coming months and years. The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, may be best known for its ability to look into some of the deepest recesses in the universe, but scientists will also use the telescope to study our cosmic neighborhood in more detail.
As these images of Jupiter are used as a guide for JWST engineers, they’re not as scintillating as the full-color, highly processed images released by NASA this week of distant nebulae and galaxies. But the images show the kind of resolution we can expect from JWST images of the outer solar system. Jupiter’s iconic storm feature, the Great Red Spot, can be clearly seen in the images, as well as the icy moon Europa. The thin rings of Jupiter, which are often overlooked in images of the gas giant, appear very faint, according to The Verege.
The images prove that JWST will be able to see relatively faint objects such as the rings and moons surrounding especially bright planets in our outer solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn.
This will come in handy in our ongoing hunt for possible signs of life near Earth. For example, scientists believe that both icy moons Enceladus Europa and Saturn harbor liquid oceans beneath their crusts, reservoirs that may contain the right materials for life to exist. According to NASA, JWST may be able to monitor these moons and any water ice columns erupting from beneath their surfaces.
Asteroid images released by NASA also show JWST’s ability to track fast-moving objects. Scientists want to use the observatory to track things like asteroids, comets, and more. To test this ability, the commissioning team sealed an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, proving that they can observe it using JWST. In the end, they found that the observatory could track the movement of objects twice as fast as they expected to be able to track it. It’s “similar to photographing a turtle crawling when it stands one mile away,” NASA wrote in a blog.