The telescope records the largest moon of Saturn and impresses scientists

• This week, NASA released the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) capture of Titan’s clouds.

• The images and data recorded by the telescope amazed scientists.

• The researchers identified two clouds, one located above the satellite’s largest seas.

The NASA Released this week, taken by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from clouds Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The images and data recorded by the telescope moved the scientists, according to a statement from the space agency.

The goal was to map the distribution of haze and identify new gases, among other points. Like Earth, Titan’s composition has a predominance of water, as it is made of ice, rivers, and seas filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons. Moreover, its atmosphere is thick and hazy, peppered with methane clouds.

Connor Nixon, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, arranged for JWST to spend a total of 15 hours of its first year studying Titan.

And the scientists were pleased with the data that JWST sent them. “At first glance, it’s simply extraordinary,” Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at Paris City University and research fellow, wrote in an email shared in the statement. “I think we see a cloud!”

While analyzing the data, the researchers identified not one, but two clouds, including, interestingly, one located over Kraken Mare, Titan’s largest sea. Scientists were soon inspired to find a way to double-scan these clouds to understand how they had changed over time. The team turned to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which was able to obtain observations of Titan just two days after JWST.

“We were worried the clouds would disappear when we looked at Titan two days later with Keck,” Emke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who leads Keck’s observations of Titan, said in the release. But, to our delight, there were clouds in the same positions, which seemed to have changed shape.

Scientists aren’t done exploring the notes yet. They identified the clouds in images taken by JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a powerful camera that can image a target in several different wavelengths of light, which in Titan’s case allows scientists to decipher its lower atmosphere.