Zoom in / Saturn’s stars visible in this near-infrared image taken on June 25 by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope first spotted Saturn, completing its family photo of the ringed planet nearly a year after the mission’s first images were released.
Near-infrared webcam captured this image of Saturn on June 25. Scientists added an orange color to the monochrome image to produce the image, which was released on Friday.
The image shows Saturn’s iconic icy rings glowing around a giant disk of gas, which appears darker in the near infrared due to absorption of sunlight by methane molecules suspended in the planet’s atmosphere.
Webb aimed a gold-coated mirror 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) high at Saturn as part of a monitoring program to test telescopes’ ability to detect fainter moons. The observations included many deep exposures of Saturn that astronomers are still analyzing to probe the planet’s faint rings and search for undiscovered moons.
There are 146 known moons orbiting Saturn, ranging in size from the planet Mercury to the size of a sports arena, more than any other planet in the solar system, according to NASA.
“Each newly discovered moon can help scientists construct a more complete picture of Saturn’s current system, as well as its past,” NASA said in a blog post published with the new Saturn images.
Three of Saturn’s moons are visible to the left of the planet from Webb’s view: Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys are visible as points of light. Each is the size of a large US state.
Recent observations of Enceladus using the Webb Near Infrared Spectrometer instrument revealed a stream of water vapor stretching more than 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) into space, 20 times the diameter of the moon. Scientists say Enceladus is one of the most promising locations in the solar system for searching for signs of life because it has a watery ocean beneath a global icy crust.
Zoom in / The James Webb Space Telescope first spotted (clockwise) Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STSci
NASA’s Cassini orbiter flew past Enceladus several times before its mission ended in 2017. Cassini saw a similar jet of water erupt through cracks in Enceladus’s ice cap and fly past the jet to sample particles coming from the depths of the moon’s ocean.
The Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Saturn at a higher resolution than Webb, but with the Cassini mission winding down, Webb is the main tool with which scientists will continue to study Enceladus and Saturn for at least the next decade.
There are currently no missions in the books to visit Enceladus. NASA’s Dragonfly robotic mission is scheduled to launch toward Saturn in 2027, but will focus on exploring Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
Webb’s first science images released nearly a year ago show the promise of the $10 billion mission to look deeper into the universe than ever before. Observations in the solar system are just part of Webb’s science portfolio, along with science topics such as studying the formation of the first galaxies after the Big Bang and the search for planets around other stars that might contain the ingredients for life.
Webb’s science team has previously released stunning views of the Solar System’s other ring planets – Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus – along with their first observations of Mars.
Located about a million miles from Earth, Webb cannot observe the Moon, Mercury or Venus because they are too bright or too close to the Sun.
2023-07-01 02:57:53
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