Following the earlier “Spider Nebula”, NASA released an image of “Mars” today captured by the Webb Space Telescope, which is also the first image of Mars returned by the telescope after its launch at the end of last year.
As the Webb Space Telescope is designed to detect distant galaxies, it is easy for the very close Mars to cause the instrument to show a chaotic picture of the saturation of the detector. Astronomers can only use a very short exposure picture to receive through the received part of the light with the application of special data analysis techniques to adjust the extreme brightness of Mars.
The images and spectra released this time on September 5, were taken mainly by the NIRCam near-infrared camera and the NIRSpec near-infrared spectrometer, and the location was the eastern half of Mars. First you can see on the right side of Figure 1 there are two images taken by NIRCam with a short wavelength of 2.1 microns and a long wavelength of 4.3 microns. The first shows Huygens crater, the dark volcanic rocks of Great Setis, and the plain Greece, and the latter shows It is an image of thermal radiation. The brightness of the light is related to the temperature of the surface and the atmosphere. The bright yellow is exactly on the epipolar saturation line of the sensor, but there is also some light is absorbed by carbon dioxide as it passes through the atmosphere.
Figure 2 then shows the spectrum recorded by NIRSpec, also the first Mars spectrum from the Webb Space Telescope, where preliminary analysis revealed a rich set of spectral signatures, including information about dust, ice clouds, the types of rocks on the planet’s surface , and the composition of the atmosphere In the future, Mars team members will use this information to continue looking for differences in different parts of the surface, and trace gases such as methane and hydrogen chloride in the atmosphere.
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