Mars looks blinding as Webb telescope zooms in on Red Planet for the first time – India Today

After observing Jupiter and revealing a unique set of rings going around it, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has trained its lenses towards Mars. The worlds most powerful observatory has captured its first images and spectra of Mars, which could help better understand churnings happening on the Red Planet.

The telescope, which is equipped to take science back in time and observe the changes and evolution that have shaped planetary objects over millennia, can help in revealing new insights into the planet's dust storms, weather patterns, seasonal changes, and the processes that occur at different times of Martian day.

The telescope joins orbiters and rovers in unraveling the secrets of Mars as humans look to set up colonies on the planet in the near future.

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The telescope in its first image captured the Red Planet using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which shows a region of the planets eastern hemisphere at two different wavelengths. Nasa released the image with a surface reference map and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the left, with the two Webb NIRCam instrument fields of view overlaid.

Left: Reference map of the observed hemisphere of Mars from Nasa and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Top right: NIRCam image showing 2.1-micron (F212 filter) reflected sunlight, revealing surface features such as craters and dust layers. Bottom right: Simultaneous NIRCam image showing ~4.3-micron (F430M filter) emitted light that reveals temperature differences with latitude and time of day. (Photo: Nasa)

The image captured by the NIRCam reveals surface details similar to those apparent in visible-light images. The image shows the rings of the Huygens Crater, the dark volcanic rock of Syrtis Major, and the brightening in the Hellas Basin are all apparent in this image.

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Meanwhile, the NIRCam image captured at a longer wavelength shows off the light given off by the planet as it loses heat. "The brightest region on the planet is where the Sun is nearly overhead, because it is generally warmest. The brightness decreases towards the polar regions, which receive less sunlight, and less light is emitted from the cooler northern hemisphere, which is experiencing winter at this time of year," Nasa said in a release with the image.

Located nearly 1,50,000 kilometers away from Earth, the James Webb telescope is equipped to see light coming from the edge of time. However, Mars is the closest planet to the spacecraft, which adds to new challenges in observing it. The location provides a view of Mars observable disk, which is the portion of the sunlit side that is facing the telescope.

Since Mars is closest to the observatory, the Red Planet is one of the brightest objects in the night sky in terms of both visible light (which human eyes can see) and infrared light. This adds to the difficulty since the observatory was built to detect the extremely faint light of the most distant galaxies in the universe.

To see Mars, the Webb team had to adjust for Mars extreme brightness by using very short exposures, measuring only some of the light that hit the detectors, and applying special data analysis techniques.

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Mars looks blinding as Webb telescope zooms in on Red Planet for the first time - India Today