Micrometeoroid causes ‘uncorrectable’ damage to James Webb Space Telescope
Global News
The $10-billion space telescope suffered damage to segment C3 of its mirror array, but its performance is still exceeding scientists' expectations.
A joint report from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency has revealed that the $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suffered “uncorrectable” damage left by a micrometeoroid strike in late May.
The paper was authored by more than 200 scientists and outlined the performance of the space telescope during its commissioning phase.
It reported that since launch, JWST has been hit by six micrometeoroids: about one strike per month since the telescope first left Earth on Christmas Day 2021. (A micrometeoroid is exactly what it sounds like: a tiny meteoroid. It weighs less than one gram.)
This was expected by scientists, who anticipated that tiny fragments of asteroids, roughly the size of a grain of sand, would occasionally collide with JWST’s 18 beryllium-gold segments which fold out to create a 6.5-metre mirror.
What they didn’t expect was that a micrometeoroid could cause such significant damage, and so close to the start of JWST’s mission, too. While five of the micrometeoroid strikes had negligible effects, one space rock in particular defied modelling by the JSWT Project.
Sometime between May 23 and May 25, segment C3 of James Webb’s mirror was hit by a micrometeoroid, causing a small, but “not yet measurable” effect to the telescope’s output.
While the impact to the telescope is minor, it caused a “significant uncorrectable change in the overall figure of that segment,” according to the paper.
Engineers working on the telescope were able to realign the segments of JWST’s mirror to adjust for the damage.