James Webb Space Telescope has comets to catch when science begins

Scientists hope to find out secrets about comets with the start of science operations this month.

In a study led by the executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, the James Webb Space Telescope will be trained on three comets. The comet's chemical compositions will be analyzed. Some of the most primitive bodies in the solar system are comets.

Hammel said that they want to study comets with the telescope because of its powerful capabilities. The chemical makeup of the dust and gas that comes off of the comet's nucleus can be studied with the help of those wavelengths of light.

NASA explains the telescope's innovative optics.

Three comets will be observed by the team. There is a chance that the first comet will be a Jupiter - family comet. There will be a main belt comet.

The third will be a comet that hasn't been found yet. The researchers hope that this third comet will be spotted before the start of the study and that it will belong to a different comet family than the other two. The Oort Cloud comet may have originated on the outskirts of the solar system. There is a chance that another possible "opportunity comet" could come from even farther away.

"Webb's ability to sense faint objects makes it a great tool to study these very rare and very faint interlopers," he said. It might open a whole new field of study if we could get a better idea of its surface.

Some of the first observed comets will be these three, but they will not be the last.

Michael Kelley, an associate research scientist at the University, said, "These are just individual examples, but we will eventually observe many comets, and we will have lots of examples from these different classes, and we can compare them all to each other." We will have a better understanding of where these comets come from with the help of all the ground-based data that we have.

The study is part of the first year of the guaranteed time observations program.

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