"Water vapor in the asteroid belt is huge," said Milam."That means there's some kind of mechanism preserving water ice in an asteroid-like body that close to our sun."
An image of Comet 238P/Read, a main asteroid belt comet discovered to be surrounded by water vapor, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope on Sept. 8, 2022. Every observation JWST makes also benefits from its mind-boggling optics. JWST was required to have a tiny diffraction limit of just two microns, said Milam. But the telescope ended up even more precise — its diffraction limit is currently 1.
"Everyone's […] getting even better data than they had hoped for" because of these optics, said Milam. On top of the amazing quality of observations, the telescope's launch went so well that it conserved notably more fuel than scientists were predicting. Though NASA first expected JWST to last about 10 years or less, now it's predicted to continue operating for 20 years, into the 2040s.
Three views of a planet-forming disk in the Orion nebula taken with the James Webb Space Telescope instruments NIRCam , MIRI , and the two combined .