At the end of May, a larger-than-expected micrometeoroid struck NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope. One of the aircraft’s main mirror sections was damaged in the accident.
The mission crew will have to repair the distortion and disturbance caused by the strike, even though the telescope is “still working at a level that exceeds all mission requirements,” according to The Verge.
The new next-generation telescope will be able to see stars and galaxies that emerged after the Big Bang.
The construction of the telescope took 20 years and a total cost of $10 billion. It was safely launched two years ago on Christmas Day and has since been stationed 1 million miles from Earth.
Since its inception, the telescope has been hit by four separate micrometeoroids, all of which were extremely small and did not do any harm.
The gold coating on the telescope’s mirrors is meant to withstand small space debris collisions, but not larger ones.
Paul Geithner, a technical deputy project manager of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said, “We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which 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.”
Engineers are doing everything they can to keep the sensitive space telescope safe from further collisions. NASA optimistically stated in a blog post, “Webb’s beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve.”
To read our blog on “NASA set a test of Boeing’s autonomous Starliner space capsule,” click here.
