Jupiter has a lot going on: giant storms, strong winds, auroras, and extremes of temperature and pressure. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the massive planet. Webb’s observations of Jupiter will give researchers even more clues about Jupiter’s inner life. “We didn’t really expect it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of an international collaboration for Webb’s Early Release Science program, De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory. Webb itself is an international mission led by NASA with partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). “It’s really remarkable that we can see details of Jupiter along with its rings, tiny moons and even its galaxies in one image,” he said. The two images come from the observatory’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). It has three specialized infrared filters that show details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped to the visible spectrum. Typically, longer wavelengths appear redder and shorter wavelengths appear bluer. The astronomers worked with citizen scientist Judy Schmidt to translate the Webb data into images. Created from a composite of several images from Webb, the stand-alone view of Jupiter features auroras that extend at high altitudes above Jupiter’s north and south poles. The auroras shine on a filter that is mapped to redder colors, which also accentuates the light reflected from the lower clouds and upper mists. Another filter, which is mapped in yellow and green, shows fogs swirling around the north and south poles. A third filter, mapped to blue, shows light reflected from a deeper main cloud. The Great Red Spot, a famous storm so big it could swallow the Earth, looks white in these views Other clouds do too because they reflect a lot of sunlight. “The brightness here indicates high altitude – so the Great Red Spot has high-altitude haze, as does the equatorial region,” said Heidi Hammel, Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist for Solar System Observations and vice president of science at AURA. “The numerous bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are probably very high altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms.” In contrast, the dark bands north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover. Composite Webb NIRCam image from two filters – F212N (orange) and F335M (cyan) – of the Jupiter system, unlabeled (top) and labeled (bottom). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team. Image editing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt. In a wide-field view, Webb sees Jupiter with its faint rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet. It also shows two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. The fuzzy blobs in the lower background are probably distant galaxies “photographing” this Jovian view. “This one image sums up the science of the Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings and its satellite system,” said Fouchet. Scientists have already started analyzing Webb’s data to get new scientific results about our solar system’s largest planet. Data from telescopes like Webb doesn’t reach Earth neatly. Instead, it contains information about the brightness of the light in Webb’s probes. This information arrives as raw data at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Webb’s mission and science operations center. STScI processes the data into calibrated files for scientific analysis and delivers them to the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes for dissemination. Researchers then translate this information into images like these during their research (here’s a podcast about it). A team at STScI is officially processing Webb images for official release. However, non-professional astronomers known as citizen scientists often dip into the public data archive to retrieve and process images as well. Judy Schmidt of Modesto California is a longtime image editor in the citizen science community. He elaborated these new views of Jupiter. For the image that includes the tiny satellites, he collaborated with Ricardo Hueso, a co-investigator on these observations, who studies planetary atmospheres at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. Citizen scientist Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California processes astronomical images from NASA spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope. An example of her work is Minkowski’s butterfly, right, a planetary nebula in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. Schmidt actually has no formal educational background in astronomy. However, 10 years ago, an ESA competition sparked her insatiable passion for image processing. The ‘Hubble’s Hidden Treasures’ contest invited the public to find new gems in the Hubble data. Out of nearly 3,000 submissions, Schmidt placed third for an image of a newborn star. Since the ESA competition, he has been working on Hubble and other telescope data as a hobby. “Something about it just stuck with me and I can’t stop,” she said. “I could spend hours and hours every day.” Her love of astronomy imagery led her to process images of nebulae, globular clusters, star nurseries and more spectacular cosmic objects. Her guiding philosophy is: “I try to make it look natural, even if it’s nothing close to what your eye can see.” These images have caught the attention of professional scientists, including Hammel, who previously worked with Schmidt to improve Hubble images of the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. Schmidt says Jupiter is actually harder to work with than more distant cosmic wonders because of how fast it spins. Combining a stack of images into one view can be difficult when Jupiter’s distinguishing features have rotated during the acquisition of the images and are no longer aligned. Sometimes he has to make digital adjustments to stack the images in a way that makes sense. Webb will deliver observations on each phase of cosmic history. However, if Schmidt had to pick just one thing to be excited about, it would be more Webb views of star-forming regions. In particular, it is fascinated by young stars that produce powerful jets in small parts of nebulae called Herbig–Haro objects. “I’m really looking forward to seeing these weird and wonderful baby stars blow holes in nebulae,” he said.
