Look at Webb's first photos of Mars: they are literally blinding

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first images of Mars. Observatory created

within the framework of international cooperation with ESA(European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), allows you to look at the Red Planet in a new way thanks to sensitivity in the infrared spectrum.

Webb's first images of Marsusing the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), show an area of ​​the planet's eastern hemisphere in two different wavelengths, or colors, of infrared light. The first image in this article shows a reference surface map from NASA and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the left, with the field of view of the two Webb NIRCam instruments overlaid. On the right are near-infrared images of Webb.

Photo: Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Mars JWST/GTO

Because the Red Planet is closeto Earth, it is one of the brightest objects in the night sky in terms of both visible and infrared light that Webb detects. The telescope's instruments are so sensitive that without special observing techniques, the bright light from Mars is simply blinding, causing a phenomenon known as detector saturation, NASA says.

Astronomers have adjusted the extreme brightnessThe Red Planet using very short exposures. Thus, they measured only a fraction of the light that hit the detectors and applied special data analysis techniques.

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