'We weren't expecting that.'
The explanation, according to principal investigator Geronimo Villanueva also of Goddard, lies lies in the planet's atmosphere.
"The Hellas Basin is a lower altitude, and thus experiences higher air pressure," Villanueva explained in a NASA. "That higher pressure leads to a suppression of the thermal emission at this particular wavelength range due to an effect called pressure broadening. It will be very interesting to tease apart these competing effects in these data."
You’d think it’d be a no-brainer to point the groundbreaking space telescope, capable of capturing celestial bodies billions of lightyears away, at a planet in our own solar system. But it’s trickier than it sounds. Because the James Webb is so powerful, something as close as Mars is astonishingly bright and overwhelming to its sensors.
To overcome that challenge, NASA astronomers used short exposures so that the images didn’t appear blown out, and used special techniques to analyze the resulting data.
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