Our Solar System

Narration: Stefanie Milam

Transcript:

It’s really essential to study our own solar system because that’s sort of what we’re comparing all the other planets around other stars to. We had to make sure this highly sensitive, huge telescope that’s designed to detect the first stars and galaxies across the universe, could actually look at the biggest and brightest things in the solar system that are also moving at very fast rates of motion. So it was my role to help establish moving target tracking for all these small bodies in the solar system. My science goal for JWST involves the entire solar system. So observing everything from near earth object to giant planets and their satellites, icy worlds, Europa and Enceladus, things that have plumes and we suspect oceans under their surface, to the farthest reaches of the solar system, so things like trans-Neptunian objects or Kuiper Belt objects, even Pluto and its satellites.