The Washington Monument-sized space rock was discovered in data not intended to hunt asteroids and shows how useful the powerful telescope is close to home.
This is true for smaller asteroids which have been studied in less detail than their larger main-asteroid belt companions due to the difficulty of observing them. This makes the discovery of a small asteroid by the JWST especially promising as it suggests that in the future astronomers will be able to study asteroids smaller than around half a mile in diameter with the telescope.
Deciding that the data could instead be used to establish and test a new method of determining an object's orbit and estimating its size, the team conducted an analysis that revealed the"photo-bombing" asteroid.
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