NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a remarkable machine capable of many wondrous things: It can peer at galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang, examine distant planets, and zoom in on the worlds and moons of our own solar system. New research, published this month in Nature, has found that it's also surprisingly good at spying small space rocks -- including some just dozens of feet in length, the tiniest ever discovered in our solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The JWST wasn't designed to spot undiscovered asteroids; it's more of a sniper's scope used to get a close-up look at curious objects extremely far from Earth. "The average exoplanet person doesn't care about asteroids," says study coauthor Artem Burdanov, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To those studying far-flung galaxies and planets, space rocks are usually more of an annoyance than anything. "Astrophysicists have had to deal with asteroids photobombing their datasets ever since they started using photography in the 1800s and termed them 'vermin of the skies' as a result," says Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland who was not involved with the new study.