James Webb Space Telescope Discovery

Webb Images of Jupiter and More Now Available In Commissioning Data

On the heels of Tuesday’s release of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, data from the telescope’s commissioning period is now being released on the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. The data includes images of Jupiter and images and spectra of several asteroids, captured to test the telescope’s instruments before science operations officially began July 12. The data demonstrates Webb’s to track solar system targets and produce images and spectra with unprecedented detail. “Combined with the deep field images released the other day, these images of Jupiter demonstrate the full grasp of what Webb can observe, from the faintest, most distant observable galaxies to planets in our own cosmic backyard that you can see with the naked eye from your actual backyard,” said Bryan Holler, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who helped plan these observations. Webb easily captured some of Jupiter’s rings, which especially stand out in the NIRcam long-wavelength filter image. That the rings showed up in one of Webb’s first solar system images is “absolutely astonishing and amazing,” Dr. Stefanie Milam said. “The Jupiter images in the narrow-band filters were designed to provide nice images of the entire disk of the planet, but the wealth of additional information about very faint objects (Metis, Thebe, the main ring, hazes) in those images with approximately one-minute exposures was absolutely a very pleasant surprise,” said John Stansberry, observatory scientist and NIRCam commissioning lead at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Tags: test image engineering image Jupiter and some of its moons are seen through NIRCam’s 3.23 micron filter. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and B. Holler and J. Stansberry (STScI). Jupiter glows almost white and Europa at left is also so bright it glows and the center is black from the light flooding the detectors. The moons also glow white. The background is a sepia color.
Left: Jupiter, center, and its moons Europa, Thebe, and Metis are seen through the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument 2.12 micron filter. Right: Jupiter and Europa, Thebe, and Metis are seen through NIRCam’s 3.23 micron filter. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and B. Holler and J. Stansberry (STScI). Two views of Jupiter are side by side in this image, both with dark purple backgrounds that contrast with the orange glow of the planet in the infrared. On the left Jupiter's stripes are visible as well as several moons. On the right the bands are not as visible but they shows more of the moons. The moons are spots of orange, except Europa, which is so bright it has a black spot at center, where its light has flooded the detectors.
Jupiter, center, and its moon Europa, left, are seen through the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument 2.12 micron filter. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and B. Holler and J. Stansberry (STScI). Jupiter dominates the frame, appearing to glow with bands of bright white, light yellow, and darker, brownish oranges. The stripes circle the planet, with one especially thick bright band across the planet’s center. A spot of glowing bright white interrupts the darker brown band about a third from the bottom of the planet. To the left of Jupiter, Europa appears as a tiny, black circle with a bright starburst erupting from its edges. The background of the image is pure black.
Raw images