NEWS NCR by Bhagyashree Soni July 16, 2022
Damage to the James Webb Telescope’s major mirror from a micrometeorite strike in May is worse than first thought, in response to new pictures revealed in a brand new report.
A paper printed Tuesday on the educational preprint server arxiv.org detailing Webb’s efficiency throughout the commissioning of the telescope revealed that many of the micrometeorite strikes on Webb’s huge mirror resulted in negligible injury, a strike that occured in mid-may left the telescope with everlasting injury.
“The single micrometeorite impact that occurred between 22 — 24 May 2022 UT exceeded prelaunch expectations of damage for a single micrometeoroid triggering further investigation and modeling by the JWST Project,” the report learn.
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which encloses the first mirror the telescope makes use of to gather mild and focus mild on scientific devices in a cylindrical housing, Webb’s 6.5-metre diameter segmented mirror is uncovered to area. But given Webb’s orbit round Lagrangian level 2, or L2, a area of area about 1 million miles from Earth, scientists solely anticipated Webb to come across probably hazardous micrometeorites about as soon as per thirty days.
More:
https://www.newsncr.com/technology/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-damaged-after-being-smashed-by-space-rock-images-show/
