JWST Observes Mars Very Carefully
JWST captured a pair of infrared images of Mars taken at two different wavelengths that reveal thermal features due to sunlight.
If it feels like we’re getting a lot of “JWST does something for the first time” stories this year… it’s because we are. That’s by design for a couple of reasons. One, obviously, is to get the public excited about the capabilities of a telescope that went into massive cost overruns. Two is to get science data into the hands of early observers who can then learn the instrumentation and nuances of gathering data with the big infrared light bucket.
This week, the newest images are of Mars. Once again, they have tracked JWST to look inside our solar system, just as they did with Jupiter last month. These observations aren’t exactly simple to take, either. Mars is incredibly close to the telescope, making it a very bright object both in visible and infrared light. Since JWST is a giant light bucket, astronomers had to use some special techniques to not cause “detector saturation” while collecting data. They took the images in very short exposures, only measuring part of the light hitting the detectors, and then applied some bespoke data analysis methods to reduce that data.
