A micrometeorite hits the James Webb

NASA has reported that a tiny space rock has hit the James Webb Telescope. How does this incident affect the development of the mission?

Micrometeorite impacts are an unavoidable aspect of the operation of any spacecraft, even more so when several years must pass in the cosmos, the collisions will continue to occur during the entire life of the web which is expected to be between 5 to 10 years.

Such impacts were taken into account when building and testing the ground-based space telescope mirror that was designed to withstand bombardment from micrometeorites in its orbit around the sun, but it has also been prepared to withstand other challenges in the extreme space environment such as For example, strong ultraviolet light and charged particles from the sun, as well as cosmic rays from events occurring in the galaxy.

In addition, flight technicians can use protective maneuvers that intentionally save the most sensitive optical system from known meteor showers before they occur, even though the impact that is in the news now was not the result of a shower. known meteorites and NASA believe it was a fortuitous and unavoidable event.

The region that the telescope occupies is not a total vacuum, and this has proven it, it is an inevitable event, but the engineers who built the telescope are well aware of the rigors of space and where it would be located; The James Webb occupies a region one and a half million kilometers from Earth, called L2, which is what is known as a Lagrange point, where the gravitational interaction between two orbiting bodies (in this case, the Earth and the Sun), is balanced by the centripetal force of the orbit, to create a stable pocket, where low-mass objects can be parked to reduce fuel consumption.

This is very useful for science, but these regions can also collect other items. It's unclear exactly how much dust L2 has collected, but it would be foolish to expect the region to have collected nothing. Therefore, Webb was specifically designed to withstand the bombardment of dust-sized particles traveling at extremely high speeds.

NASA Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager Li Feinberg stated that. “With Webb's mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional impacts from micrometeorites would slowly degrade the telescope's performance over time. Since launch, we've had four smaller measurable micrometeorite impacts that were consistent with expectations, but this most recent one is larger than our degradation predictions assumed. We will use this flight data to update our performance analysis over time, as well as develop operational approaches to ensure that we maximize Webb's imaging performance to the best of our ability for many years to come."

It is a telescope of 10 billion dollars and many scientific hopes placed on it, it would be a real shame if a small fragment ended so many illusions.

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