"The First Year of the James Webb Space Telescope: What We’ve Learned, What is Still to Come"
The James Webb Space Telescope – an innovative infrared space telescope – launched into space on Christmas Day in 2021. During its first year, JWST has already made revolutionary advances across astronomy with its infrared capability and high sensitivity. In this talk, Dr. Heidi B. Hammel will provide a status update of the Webb Telescope and highlight some of amazing results from JWST’s first year. Dr. Hammel is one of the six Interdisciplinary Scientists for Webb; she leads a program designed to use JWST to explore the Solar System. Her team's targets run the gamut of planetary science: asteroids; Mars; Jupiter and its moon Europa; Saturn, its rings, and its moons Titan and Enceladus; Uranus and Neptune; comets; and the denizens of the distant Kuiper Belt including Pluto. This talk will share a sampling of JWST Solar System science but will also show some of the spectacular deep space images of galaxies and gravitational lenses. Dr. Hammel will also highlight JWST studies of planets around other stars, explaining how we can study their atmospheres. She will finish with a look ahead not only for JWST, but for the future of space astrophysics.
