NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a piece of space rock.
One of the large mirrors that powered the segment was hit by a micrometeoroid that was larger than expected and larger than the engineers were able to test on Earth, the space agency said.
Although assessments are still ongoing, the telescope still appears to be working well enough, but the collision had “a negligible detectable effect in the data,” NASA said in a statement.
The object hit one of the pieces of the mirror, which allows the telescope to work somewhere between May 23 and 25, the space agency said.
NASA said the telescope was designed to withstand such impacts, even if the piece of rock is larger than expected.
During the construction process, researchers used a combination of simulations and actual impacts on mirror pieces to see how the telescope would be able to withstand the impact of particles flying at very fast speeds in space, it said.
“We’ve always known that the Web will have to withstand a space environment that includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy and accidental micrometeroid impacts in our solar system,” said Paul Geithner, deputy technical director. of the project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We designed and built Webb with a margin of productivity – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure that it can fulfill its ambitious scientific mission even after many years in space.
The space telescope is also able to deal with any collisions by moving its mirrors around to correct any problems with specific segments. He has already been relocated to deal with the collision and further fine-tuning is still needed, the statement said.
The telescope can also move in space so that engineers can move more sensitive parts of it from the path of known meteor showers. However, the particle that hit the telescope is not part of such a famous shower, and in anticipation of further investigation, NASA believes that this was inevitable.
Over time, however, the telescope will inevitably be hit by harder objects in space, which will worsen its performance. This process is expected, and NASA simply hopes that the telescope’s performance is high enough that even as it deteriorates, it may be useful for years to come.
“With Web’s mirrors in space, we expected accidental micrometeorological impacts to gracefully impair the telescope’s performance over time,” said Lee Feinberg, NASA’s Goddard Optical Telescope Element Manager.
“Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeorological shocks that were in line with expectations and the recent one, which is larger than our degradation forecasts. We will use this flight data to update our performance analysis over time, as well as to develop operational approaches to ensure that we maximize Webb image performance to the best possible extent for many years to come.
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