The James Webb Space Telescope has made incredible headway, peering farther across space and time than any telescope that came before.
But it's also showing us the Universe closer to home… and now it's turned its gold-plated eye to Earth's next-door-neighbor,The resulting images show Mars in a very different light – infrared, in fact – giving us information about the red planet that we wouldn't be able to see with our own naked eyes.
To the left, a simulated Mars globe shows the features visible to JWST: at top right, the image at 2.1 microns shows surface features such as craters and dust. At bottom right, the 4.3-micron image shows a heat map of the Mars atmosphere, warmed by the Sun. But heat isn't the only source of infrared light at this wavelength. A dark smear can be seen towards the bottom right of the brightest region in this wavelength; this is actually produced by a feature on the surface of Mars. It's a huge impact basin calledThe atmosphere on Mars is 96 percent carbon dioxide, which absorbs light. And the atmosphere is thicker enough over the Hellas Planitia for this to have an observable effect in infrared wavelengths.
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