Launch on hold at T-40, some kind of issue with hydrogen cryo fuel and readying an engine to the right temperature, flight director meeting with hydrogen team now.....
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Space and stuff
- Thread starter rascal
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Scrubbed. Boooo!!!!
Very cool images of Neptune from the Webb telescope
www.nasa.gov
New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades - NASA
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light.
www.nasa.gov
McBain
Player Valuation: £80m
Very cool images of Neptune from the Webb telescope
New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades - NASA
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light.
Not gunna lie, a little uninspired about Webbs images so far... and I don't quite get why it's looking at stuff in our own Solar system.
It has a short lifespan, so needs to concentrate on what we don't know surely? I want exo-planets not boring old ones.
You are uninspired? I think the images to come out are absolutely FANTASTIC!!!
You do realise, we can't see exoplanets with JWST? They are simply too far away. What we can see is evidence of them through things like light refraction as it passes in front of the star it is orbiting. Then based on the light waves frequency recieved, we can then tell what elements make up the atmosphere.
Plus, JWST is more of a deep space telescope, out of the visual spectrum, not a planet hunter.
Why not look at our own solar system with our most advanced telescope? The possibility of learning new things about our near neighbors is quite high.
Yes, the lifespan is "short" but as the orbital insertion by the Ariane 5 rocket was so precise, the JWST used much less onboard fuel to get into L2 orbit, and effectively doubled the life of the mission from 10 to 20 years!!!
McBain
Player Valuation: £80m
1 fuzzy translucent picture of Neptune, with absolutey no discernable details is not fantastic imo.
Look at this image below of three different Neptune images. How is the last image the best one???
Send out probes to the planets we know all about, get MUCH better intel - get that telescope trained on Proxima Centauri ffs!
Webb doesn't have optical sensors (at least any of the primary sensors). It is all WAAAAY up the frequency spectrum.1 fuzzy translucent picture of Neptune, with absolutey no discernable details is not fantastic imo.
Look at this image below of three different Neptune images. How is the last image the best one???
Send out probes to the planets we know all about, get MUCH better intel - get that telescope trained on Proxima Centauri ffs!
So what you are looking at is not even close to what a human eye would see.
It tells the scientists so much more about the planet than Hubble ever could.
Webb was not commissioned and launched for "wow!" Pictures. It's for science. And boy is it reaping that!!
And can I point out:1 fuzzy translucent picture of Neptune, with absolutey no discernable details is not fantastic imo.
Look at this image below of three different Neptune images. How is the last image the best one???
Send out probes to the planets we know all about, get MUCH better intel - get that telescope trained on Proxima Centauri ffs!
"1 fuzzy translucent picture of Neptune, with absolutey no discernable details is not fantastic imo"
Look at it.......it is seeing INTO the planet!!
McBain
Player Valuation: £80m
Ok that makes sense, but they built up the wow. I was expecting wow but will temper my expectations.
Damn you Science!
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light.
Most striking in Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings – some of which have not been detected since NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune’s fainter dust bands.
“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” notes Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.
Neptune has fascinated researchers since its discovery in 1846. Located 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, Neptune orbits in the remote, dark region of the outer solar system. At that extreme distance, the Sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth.
This planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Compared to the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune is much richer in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This is readily apparent in Neptune’s signature blue appearance in Hubble Space Telescope images at visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of gaseous methane.
Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, have recorded these rapidly evolving cloud features over the years.
More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases.
Neptune’s 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb’s view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it.
Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb’s images, but this is not a star. Rather, this is Neptune’s large and unusual moon, Triton.
Covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It far outshines Neptune in this image because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption at these near-infrared wavelengths. Triton orbits Neptune in an unusual backward (retrograde) orbit, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was originally a Kuiper belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of both Triton and Neptune are planned in the coming year.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
Laura Betz
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Last Updated: Sep 21, 2022
Editor: Jessica Merzdorf
Nasa launches most ambitious, complex and expensive telescope in history.
Evertonian: crap that lad.
Evertonian: crap that lad.
To think, I arrived in this thread after being swamped by woeful tales of DIY from the new kitchen thread by @chrismpw looking for some highbrow brain food
then this................
Lord help us all!
She does make some good movies though!
chrismpw
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Thats the sounds of screaming in terror from billions of lifeforms and a grand piano, being dragged to spaghettification
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