James Webb Space Telescope

In News

• Recently the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured new images of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter.

Key Highlights

• The pictures showed Jupiter in a never before seen light. 

Image Courtesy: IE 

• The photographs published:
  • They have captured a new view of the planet, presenting in detail its massive storms, colorful auroras, faint rings and two small moons: 
    • Amalthea and 
    • Adrastea.
• Camera: The telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, with its specialized infrared filters, has shown Jupiter encompassed in blue, green, white, yellow and orange hues. 
• Infrared Light to Visible conversion: Since infrared light is not visible to the human eye, the images were artificially coloured to match those on the visible spectrum, so that the planet’s distinctive features could stand out, according to NASA.
• Great Red Spot of Jupiter: 
  • It is a storm so big that it could swallow Earth, appearing bright white in the image, since it was reflecting a lot of sunlight, the space agency stated.

The Webb Telescope 

• About:
  • It is the world’s premier space science observatory. 
  • It will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. 
  • NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Telescope was developed with the assistance of the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
  • The telescope launched on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
• Mission: 
  • It will be “a giant leap forward in the quest to understand the Universe and our origins”, as it will examine every phase of cosmic history: from the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the evolution of our own Solar System.

• Current status: 
  • It is currently at a point in space known as the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, approximately 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
    • Lagrange Point 2 is one of the five points in the orbital plane of the Earth-Sun system. 
    • Named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the points are in any revolving two-body system like Earth and Sun, marking where the gravitational forces of the two large bodies cancel each other out. 
      • Objects placed at these positions are relatively stable and require minimal external energy or fuel to keep themselves there, and so many instruments are positioned here.
• Different from other telescopes:
  • The JWST will be able to see right through and into massive clouds of dust that are opaque to earlier generation visible-light observatories like the Hubble Telescope. 
  • The Webb is equipped with cameras and other instruments sensitive to infrared or “heat” radiation, and the Hubble is not.

• The technology:
  • Scientists receive raw data about the brightness of the light captured on Webb’s detectors, which is then processed and translated into images by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Webb’s mission and science operations center.

Source: IE