The JWST has been gradually cooling down ever since its successful, but the telescope took a major step forward on that front when it its massive 70-foot sunshield at the start of the year. That component allowed JWST’s systems, including its critical Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to drop to a temperature of approximately minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit (or about minus 183 degrees Celsius).

Getting the JWST to its final operating temperature required NASA and the European Space Agency to activate the telescope’s electric “cryocooler.” That in itself involved passing a technical hurdle dubbed the “pinch point,” or the stage at which the James Webb’s instruments went from minus 433 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 448 Fahrenheit.

“The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point,” said Analyn Schneider, MIRI project manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The team was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end, it was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.”

After launching late last year, NASA’s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is finally getting ready to fixate its numerous golden mirrors on distant targets.

Intriguingly, though, one of its 13 early targets isn’t so distant at all — at least in the grand scheme of things. It’ll be looking at Jupiter, the iconic gas giant in our own star system. Of course, we already know quite a bit about the planet already— so why investigate it using the JWST if it can have a closer look at far more distant objects?

“We’ve been there with several spacecraft and have observed the planet with Hubble and many ground-based telescopes at wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum (from the UV to meters wavelengths),” Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater, leader of the Jupiter observation team, told Digital Trends, “so we’ve learned a tremendous amount about Jupiter itself, its atmosphere, interior, and about its moons and rings.”

More than 13 months after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars (on 18 February 2021), the rover’s cameras have finally spotted some of the parts of the Mars 2020 landing system that got the rover safely to the ground.

The parachute and backshell were imaged by Perseverance’s MastCam-Z, seen off in the distance, just south of the rover’s current location. The image was taken on Sol 404, or 6 April 2022 on Earth.

Normally, the rover might have taken a brief side-trip early on in the mission to take images of the remains of the landing system. But Perseverance had to drive around some hazardous terrain to get to a large area of Jezero Crater that the science team wanted to study, called South Séítah.

Ars Technica had the opportunity to tour NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a clean-room sneak peek at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that learning more about this unusual asteroid will advance our understanding of planet formation and the earliest days of our Solar System.

Discovered in March 1,852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, 16 Psyche is an M-type asteroid (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from the earliest days of our Solar System, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren’t consistent with an entirely metallic remnant core. Rather, it’s more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.

Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it’s an object like 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.

It’s 85 miles wide, which is larger than the US state of Rhode Island. And it’s coming this way.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is hightailing it to a fascinating river delta region in the Jezero Crater on Mars. But to get there, it first had to pass near its original landing site. Images from there are a trip down memory lane, back to when Percy dramatically landed on the red planet in February 2021.

Steve Ruff, Arizona State University associate research professor and Mars geologist, runs the Mars Guy channel on YouTube. He posted a video on Sunday recapping the rover’s arrival on mars and what happened to the parachute and back shell — two key components of the landing system that delivered Percy safely to the surface.