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NASA\u2019s powerful\u00a0James Webb Space Telescope\u00a0includes asteroids on its list of objects studied and secrets revealed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge repurposed Webb\u2019s observations of a distant star to reveal a population of small asteroids \u2014 smaller than astronomers had ever detected orbiting the Sun in the\u00a0main asteroid belt\u00a0between Mars and Jupiter.<\/p>\n
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium \u2014 a size range in the main belt that has not been observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have been changed over time by collisions. That process is related to how some of them have escaped the main belt over the solar system\u2019s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe now understand more about how small objects in the asteroid belt are formed and how many there could be,\u201d said Tom Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in California\u2019s Silicon Valley and co-author on the\u00a0paper\u00a0presenting the results. \u201cAsteroids this size likely formed from collisions between larger ones in the main belt and are likely to drift towards the vicinity of Earth and\u00a0the\u00a0Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Insights from this research could inform the work of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames.\u00a0<\/strong>ATAP works across disciplines to support NASA\u2019s\u00a0Planetary Defense Coordination Office\u00a0by studying what would happen in the case of an Earth impact and modeling the associated risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exciting that Webb\u2019s capabilities can be used to glean insights into asteroids,\u201d said Jessie Dotson, an astrophysicist at Ames and member of ATAP. \u201cUnderstanding the sizes, numbers, and evolutionary history of smaller main belt asteroids provides important background about the near-Earth asteroids we study for planetary defense.\u201d<\/p>\n The team that made the asteroid detections, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and professor of planetary science Julien de Wit, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing Webb images for the presence of asteroids that may have been inadvertently \u201ccaught on film\u201d\u00a0as they passed in front of the telescope. Using the new image processing technique, they studied more than\u00a010,000 images of the star\u00a0TRAPPIST-1, originally taken to search for atmospheres around planets orbiting the star, in the search for life beyond Earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n Asteroids shine more brightly in infrared light, the wavelength Webb is tuned to detect, than in visible light, helping reveal the population of main belt asteroids that had gone unnoticed until now. NASA will also take advantage of that infrared glow with an upcoming mission, the\u00a0Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor. NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.<\/p>\n The paper presenting this research, \u201cDetections of decameter main-belt asteroids with JWST,\u201d was published Dec. 9 in Nature.<\/p>\n The James Webb Space Telescope is the world\u2019s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing 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 CSA (Canadian Space Agency).<\/em><\/p>\n