Spying Distant Dramas, Unfolding Now -- And Perhaps... Ones, From Back At The Dawn Of... Time, Itself.

I will let you go read the Goddard-based blog entry, to understand just what we are seeing in the top of the image, at right. But do trust that this Next Gen space telescope. . . is going to completely rewrite what we know of the most-distant star systems -- giving us hundreds of times the granularity of data -- well beyond the yield from the then-spectacular Hubble 'scope, over decades.

In sum, now that all the risky "config maneuvers" have been completed without a hiccup, we are definitively going to see "all new worlds". . . and in "all new ways", too. Here's the latest, from Goddard:

. . .“One specific exoplanet observation. . . involves collecting [infrared imagery] over the course of a planet’s orbit to enable measurements of the atmospheric composition and dynamics. . . . [We will] observe the gas giant HD 80606 b as part of [the 'scope's] first year of observations. Because the orbit of HD 80606 b is extremely eccentric (non-circular) and long (111 days), the amount of energy received by the planet from its star ranges from approximately 1 to 950 times what Earth receives from the Sun!

This results in extreme temperature variations, which are predicted to cause clouds to rapidly form and dissipate in the planet’s atmosphere on very short timescales. Our science team will probe these predicted cloud dynamics in real-time over the course of a continuous ~18 hour observation of HD 80606 b as it passes behind its star, using the NIRSpec instrument on [the 'scope] to measure thermal light from the planet’s atmosphere. . . .

“With TESS and other surveys continuing to discover additional planets in our galaxy at a regular pace and Webb preparing to study the atmospheres of many of these newly discovered worlds, our exoplanet adventures are in many ways just beginning,” [said] Knicole Colón, [the] deputy project scientist for exoplanet science, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. . . .

So it is, that a few years from now -- we may know that there is a near twin of Earth out there -- complete with liquid water and an oxygen rich, warm atmosphere -- as well as a strong magnetosphere, to shield that world from the solar and background radiation streams. . . in sum -- a place where life might easily have come to not just exist -- but to. . . thrive. Smile. . . .

नमस्ते