Attention, micrometeorite! The James Webb Space Telescope was struck by a tiny meteorite impact in late May, damaging its primary mirror very slightly but thankfully it won’t affect the mission’s continuation, NASA assured.
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Like gravel hitting a car windshield, micrometeorites can easily damage spacecraft because of their speed.
Micrometeorites are usually smaller than a grain of sand, and scientists knew the telescope would be at risk and had prepared for it.
But the impact, which took place between May 23 and 25, this time turned out to be “larger than modeled,” NASA said in a blog post.
“However, despite a detectable edge effect in the collected data, the telescope is still operating at a level that exceeds all requirements required for its mission,” assured the US space agency.
The telescope, which successfully launched over Christmas, is worth around $10 billion and is now 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. His observations are awaited by scientists around the world.
“We anticipated that micrometeorite impacts would degrade the telescope’s performance over time,” Lee Feinberg of NASA’s Goddard Center said in a statement. “Since launch, we’ve had four smaller, measurable micrometeor impacts that matched our expectations, and this one recently, larger than our predictions of deterioration. »
Scientists will now work on better predictions in the future.
The teams in charge of the telescope can reorient it to avoid possible meteor showers on the optical instruments before they occur, but the impact, which happened in late May, was “inevitable,” according to NASA.
In the event of an impact, the primary mirror consists of 18 segments, the position of which can be slightly readjusted independently of one another to limit the distortion caused. But not all undesirable effects can be completely eliminated in this way.
The first scientific and color images from the telescope, the most powerful ever launched into orbit, are due to be unveiled on July 12 and promise to be spectacular.
In particular, James Webb must enable the observation of the first galaxies, which formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and exoplanets.
The telescope mission is expected to last at least 5 years.