In its new home, the James Webb Space Telescope may not be alone.
The inevitable has happened, with a tiny piece of rock, a micrometeorite, colliding with one of the mirror segments of the telescope.
There is no need to worry. The engineers that built the telescope are very aware of the dangers of space.
The space environment includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our Solar System.
It was designed and built to be able to perform its ambitious science mission after many years in space.
The position of the man. The space agency.
The L2 region is 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.
It's known as a Lagrangian point, where the interaction between Earth and the Sun creates a stable pocket where low-mass objects can be stored.
This is useful for science, but other things can also be collected.
Jupiter has swarms of asteroids that share its path with the Sun. There are more asteroids in other planets than there are in Jupiter.
It would be foolish to think that the region didn't collect any dust at all.
It was designed to resist bombardment from high-speed particles. In order to understand the effects of the space environment on mirror samples, the engineers conducted test impacts on them.
The telescope has sensors to gauge its mirror positions, and the ability to adjust them, to help correct for any distortions that may result from impacts.
Mission Control on Earth can adjust the mirrors to where they should be. It can be turned off from known showers.
The mission will not be brought to a premature end because the physical degradation that is expected over time will not bring it to a halt.
Damage to Hubble panels was caused by Orbital debris. The space agency.
It is in a better position than Hubble, which has been subject to a constant bombardment of space debris.
It's not possible for technicians to visit and conduct repairs in the same way that Hubble is. The last time Hubble was serviced was in 2009, and it won't be getting another one any time soon.
There was a random event that caused the telescope to hit. The impact was larger than expected and it gives us an opportunity to better understand the L2 environment and find strategies to protect the telescope in the future.
Lee Feinberg, manager of the optical telescope element at NASA, said that they expected the occasional impacts on the mirrors to degrade the telescope performance.
Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations, and this one more recently that is larger than we assumed.
We will use the flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the image performance of Webb for many years to come.
On July 12th, 2022, the first full-color and spectroscopic images from Webb will be arriving. We cannot wait.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
