What will we see?
Astronomers Prepare to Turn Webb Telescope Toward Nearby Super-Earths By Ryan Whitwam on May 31, 2022 at 6:15 am
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been in space for about six months, which is just a fraction of the time NASA spent designing and building it. All that effort is about to pay off, though. Webb will begin science operations this summer, and some of its first targets will be a pair of nearby exoplanets. These planets, 55 Cancri e and LHS 3844 b are in a category of larger rocky exoplanets known as super-Earths. Webb could provide scientists the best view yet of terrestrial planets outside of our solar system.
NASA designed the JWST as a follow-up to the hugely successful Hubble Space Telescope. While Hubble needed a service mission after launch to work correctly, Webb appears to be a prime example of optical perfection. NASA reports the telescope’s instruments are “diffraction-limited,” which means it’s as good as it can possibly be given the size of the mirror.
So far, we’ve only seen a few test images from Webb, but they already show how much more powerful it is than past instruments. That could be a boon to the study of exoplanets, which are too dim to be observed in detail. However, Webb has a much larger mirror than even Hubble, and it can peer deeply into the infrared part of the light spectrum. That could allow it to collect data from 55 Cancri e and LHS 3844 b like never before. .... '
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