We’ve just received a trailer for the moment we’ve all been waiting for: a view of Saturn in all its radiant glory captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. While the final processed images are not yet available, the telescope conducted its observations with the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, and the raw images were uploaded to the unofficial JWST Feed website.

This means that we have little knowledge of what will happen when the noise is removed and the images are colored. We suspect it won’t be anything breathtaking. There are many images on the tape, many showing a bright white spot with ears as if shining a halogen flashlight on a reflective fabric, but a few stand out in particular.

First, we have this image where Saturn itself is almost black.

This is probably related to the filters used. Although Saturn and its rings shine in both infrared and near infrared wavelengths, their wavelength ranges are different. As NASA explained in 2010, “Saturn’s rings reflect sunlight at 2 microns, but not at 3 and 5 microns. At high altitude, Saturn’s smoke reflects sunlight at 2 and 3 microns.”

For these images, both filters operate at longer wavelengths, and their rings glow almost in isolation against the darkness of space. The white spots you see in the images are noise and will no doubt be cleared in final shots.

Then there are images taken with a short-wavelength filter that show the cloud bands of Saturn, rings glowing brightly around the center like a fluorescent ring light. The observations were commissioned by a team led by planetary scientist Lee Fletcher of the University of Leicester in Great Britain. They hope to use the NIRSpec data to learn more about Saturn’s moons and rings.

They say NIRSpec needs to be sensitive about detecting new moons around the planet – a timely mission given that Saturn temporarily lost the title of planet with the most moons to Jupiter several months this year.

The camera may also establish a new contact point to continue time-domain observations following the loss of the Cassini space probe in 2017. In their proposal, they also requested images of certain moons of Saturn, as well as observations made by the JWST Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). They haven’t arrived yet.

Science is undoubtedly improving, as the images are so new. We can’t wait to see how they’ll look when polished and shimmery and what else Fletcher and his team can discover for them. Source