NASA's James Webb Telescope has Successfully Chosen and Followed an Asteroid

NASA's next-generation space observatory was able to successfully watch a moving asteroid as the telescope inches toward the end of its six-month commissioning period.

Webb Telescope Tracks an Asteroid

James Webb Space Telescope can track nearby objects and keep a watch on the solar system, distant galaxies, stars, and other faraway objects, and it is expected to do so in the next 20 years, according to Space.com.

NASA wrote in a blog post on May 19 that the observatory is almost set to begin science observations.

NASA added that as they move forward through commissioning, they will begin to test other objects moving at different speeds to verify that they can study objects with Webb that move through the solar system.

Webb's ability to see nearby targets will let it observe almost everything, from icy objects in the Kuiper Belt to potentially habitable moons orbiting the gas giant planets of the solar system.

The asteroid chosen for the observing exercise was 6841 Tenzing, a main-belt asteroid named after Tenzing Norgay. The Tibetan mountaineer was one of the first two people to summit Mount Everest, together with Edmund Hillary.

The Webb observations happened just days before the 69th anniversary of their summit on May 29, 1953.

Heidi Hammel, the James Webb interdisciplinary scientist for solar system observations, said in a blog post that Bryan Holler, at the Space Telescope Science Institute, had a choice of around 40 possible asteroids to test the moving target tracking.

Quoting Holler, Hammel said that his team wanted to choose an asteroid with a name linked to success as invoking that seemed a no-brainer.

Hammel is also elected as the vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and he is also best known for years of research concerning Uranus and Neptune.

James Webb Telescope's Challenges

Webb faces a few additional challenges with tracking a moving target, NASA has said, such as needing to change between slightly colder and hotter altitudes that may affect the delicate alignment of instruments and mirrors, according to SpaceRef.

However, Hammel said that the science the telescope will bring to the outer solar system is worth all of the trouble, especially for planets like Uranus and Neptune that have only seen a single spacecraft visit those distant worlds so far.

Hammel was previously involved in the imaging campaign of the 1989 flyby of Neptune of that NASA spacecraft, Voyager 1.

Hammel said that it was the lack of a new mission to these very distant worlds that got him involved in Webb many years ago.

The Uranus team hopes to definitively link the chemistry and dynamics of the upper atmosphere, detectable with Webb, to the deeper atmosphere that they have been studying with other facilities over many decades.

Other planned science targets within the solar system include the rings of Saturn, the atmosphere of the moon Titan, observations of the several icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, and the sporadic and suspected plumes, emerging from the icy moon Europa in Hubble Space Telescope footage.

In February, James Webb Telescope captures images of the JWST.

In April, James Webb Telescope showed never-before-seen images of the cosmos.

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Written by Sophie Webster