WEBB TELESCOPE

[Barry Warmkessel]

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-comet-observations

James Webb Space Telescope has comets to catch when science begins

We want to study comets with Webb because of the telescope's very powerful capabilities in the near- and mid-infrared," Hammel said in a statement. "What makes those wavelengths of light particularly powerful for cometary studies is that they allow us to study the chemical makeup of this dust and gas that's come off of the comet's nucleus and figure out what it is."

The third will be what's called a "target-of-opportunity comet," meaning a comet that hasn't been discovered yet. The researchers hope that this third comet will be spotted by Webb before the beginning of this study and that it will belong to a different comet family than the other two targets. In one possible scenario, the team would be able to study an Oort Cloud comet that might have originated on the outskirts of the solar system. Another possible "opportunity comet" might originate from even farther afield, as did the interstellar objects 'Oumuamua and C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). 

The B comet swarm Cluster 1A has lots of “targets of opportunity”

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