How NASA's James Webb Telescope Will Find Habitable Worlds
The first teams to use the Webb Telescope have already been assigned. They will focus on finding habitable planets. This is how they will do it.
NASA scientists in California are gearing up to be among the first to use the James Webb Space Telescope. Their target is to find habitable exoplanets. The Webb Telescope recently completed a successful launch and a long, complex deployment. Now, the telescope is in L2 orbit, one million miles away from Earth, more than four times the distance to Earth's moon.
The Webb telescope, just like Hubble, and many other scientific NASA missions, will be used by thousands of scientists. NASA's processes to determine where the telescope will point to and who will get telescope time are lengthy. Several months of optic alignment still need to happen before anyone uses Webb, but the first lucky ones have already been assigned.
Scientists of NASA's Ames Research Center in California will use Webb to focus on exoplanets. They will be looking for specific clues, especially the atmosphere, orbits, and chemical signatures. They want to know how exoplanets formed, evolved, made of and if they are habitable. Their primary focus is on rocky planets as big or larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
NASA says that most exoplanets are not like any of this solar system's neighbors. "In our solar system, we have the inner rocky worlds and outer gas planets, but the most common exoplanets we see are actually in between," Natasha Batalha, a research scientist at Ames who is a co-investigator on several Webb programs, says. The team is interested in these "in-between planets."
Thomas Greene, astrophysicist expert at Ames, will study small rocky worlds that orbit very close to their dwarf "cool" stars. Their orbit may seem to be too close to their sun, but because their sun is small and cool they could be habitable. However, scientists don't know if maintaining an atmosphere so close to a star is even possible. So Greene will be looking into a system called TRAPPIST-1. The system hosts seven rocky Earth-sized planets orbiting close to a dwarf star. "A planet's atmosphere is essential for the possibility of life as we know it," Greene says.
Webb can provide data to detect the atmosphere and determine what the atmosphere is made of. Webb's instruments also allow scientists to measure an object's light accurately. This is known as the "spectrum." For example, spectrums give out chemical compositions. If the team detects exoplanets with carbon dioxide, that could imply that rocky exoplanets in the systems evolve just like Venus, Earth and Mars do. NASA has identified hundreds of thousands of exoplanets that wait to be scanned by Webb. While all of them are hundreds to billions of light-years away, the odds of finding a habitable one are high.
Source: NASA