![]() ![]() She was contributing writer for for 10 years before joining full-time. Įlizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. Hammel noted about that about 7% of Webb's first year of observations will be devoted to the solar system.įollow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter. Webb is expected to complete its science commissioning around June or so before entering a period of early science. "If we locate a plume, we will use Webb's spectroscopy to analyze the plume's composition." ![]() "We plan to take high-resolution imagery of Europa to study its surface and search for plume activity and active geologic processes," Hammel said. Other planned science targets within the solar system include the rings of Saturn, the atmosphere of the soupy moon Titan, observations of several icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, and the sporadic, suspected plumes emerging from the icy moon Europa in Hubble Space Telescope footage, Hammel said.Įuropa is a target of NASA's Europa Clipper mission and it is likely the Webb observations will help that future spacecraft with its work. James Webb Space Telescope: The engineering behind a 'first light machine' that is not allowed to fail James Webb Space Telescope: The scientific mysteries no other observatory could unravel NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope launches on epic mission to study early universe "The Uranus team hopes to definitively link the chemistry and dynamics of the upper atmosphere, detectable with Webb, to the deeper atmosphere that we have been studying with other facilities over many decades." "It was the lack of a mission to these very distant worlds that got me involved in Webb so many decades ago," Hammel said. (Hammel was involved in the imaging campaign of the 1989 flyby of Neptune of that NASA spacecraft, Voyager 1.) Webb faces a few additional challenges with tracking a moving target, NASA has said, such as needing to shift between slightly colder and hotter attitudes that may affect the delicate alignment of mirrors and instruments.īut Hammel said that the science the telescope will bring to our outer solar system is worth the trouble, especially for planets such as Uranus and Neptune that have only seen a single spacecraft visit those distant worlds so far. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (left), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (right)) A comparison of views of the same part of the sky as seen by NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope. ![]()
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