James Webb goes deep into the temperature and atmosphere of Mars digital trends

Although the James Webb Space Telescope was built primarily for looking back at the earliest and most distant galaxies, it can also be used for a variety of other scientific observations – including looking at targets right here in our own solar system. Webb will be conducting a major study of Jupiter and has already photographed Neptune. Now Webb has been used to take a fascinating look at our planetary neighbor Mars.

It’s actually quite difficult for Webb to study Mars because it’s so close and therefore very bright in both the visible light part of the spectrum and the infrared wavelengths where Webb observes. The brightness can oversaturate the detectors, which are designed to pick up very faint light sources. But Webb’s NIRCam camera was able to image the Martian surface, with two images at different wavelengths shown below.

The shorter-wavelength image shown above is similar to a visible-light image, showing features such as craters and basins. The longer-wavelength image shown below shows how the planet radiates heat. The brightest point is where the sun is directly overhead, with cooler regions toward the poles. The Hellas Basin also appears darker, but this is not due to temperature effects, but rather to altitude and air pressure effects.

Webb was also able to capture Mars with his spectrometry instruments. These can split light into different wavelengths to see the composition of an object – in this case, the composition of the Martian atmosphere as a whole. There’s strong evidence for carbon dioxide, water, and carbon monoxide, and what’s impressive about it is how well the data fits the model we already know of the Martian atmosphere. This shows how effective Webb’s instruments are for this type of spectrometry work – and how effective Webb’s potential is when it comes to studying the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Research using this Webb data is ongoing and has not yet been published or peer-reviewed, so it should not be considered definitive. But it shows how versatile a tool Webb can be as more Webb data on Mars is to come.

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