#Image of saturn through telescope download

Very exciting! There appears to be a large cloud, we believe over the northern polar region near Kraken Mare.

Our Webb Titan team lead Conor Nixon from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wrote to Imke de Pater at University of California, Berkeley, and Katherine de Kleer at Caltech, who have extensive experience using Keck: “We just received our first images of Titan from Webb, taken last night. So we quickly reached out to colleagues to request follow-up observations using the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i that evening. We then realized it was important to find out if the clouds were moving or changing shape, which might reveal information about the air flow in Titan’s atmosphere.

#Image of saturn through telescope download

Download the full-resolution version from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Several prominent surface features are labeled: Kraken Mare is thought to be a methane sea Belet is composed of dark-colored sand dunes Adiri is a bright albedo feature. Right: Color composite image using a combination of NIRCam filters: Blue=F140M (1.40 microns), Green=F150W (1.50 microns), Red=F200W (1.99 microns), Brightness=F210M (2.09 microns). The bright spots are prominent clouds in the northern hemisphere. Left: Image using F212N, a 2.12-micron filter sensitive to Titan’s lower atmosphere. Images of Saturn’s moon Titan, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument Nov. Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun. Not long after, we noticed a second cloud. By comparing different images captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), we soon confirmed that a bright spot visible in Titan’s northern hemisphere was in fact a large cloud.

So looking forward to the spectra! Congrats, all!!! Thank you!” At first glance, it is simply extraordinary! I think we’re seeing a cloud!” Webb Solar System GTO Project Lead Heidi Hammel, from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), had a similar reaction: “Fantastic! Love seeing the cloud and the obvious albedo markings. Team member Sebastien Rodriguez from the Universite Paris Cité was the first to see the new images, and alerted the rest of us via email: “What a wake-up this morning (Paris time)! Lots of alerts in my mailbox! I went directly to my computer and started at once to download the data. We were absolutely delighted with the initial results. Titan’s atmosphere is incredibly interesting, not only due to its methane clouds and storms, but also because of what it can tell us about Titan’s past and future – including whether it always had an atmosphere. We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere, including its fascinating weather patterns and gaseous composition, and also see through the haze to study albedo features (bright and dark patches) on the surface. Its atmosphere is filled with thick haze that obscures visible light reflecting off the surface. Unlike Earth, however, the liquid on Titan’s surface is composed of hydrocarbons including methane and ethane, not water. Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it is also the only planetary body other than Earth that currently has rivers, lakes, and seas. Here, Principal Investigator Conor Nixon and others on the Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) program 1251 team using Webb to investigate Titan’s atmosphere and climate describe their initial reactions to seeing the data. 5, an international team of planetary scientists woke up with great delight to the first Webb images of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Editor’s Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.