One of the large mirrors feeding the section was hit by a micrometeorological device that was larger than expected and larger than engineers could test on the ground, the space agency said. Although evaluations are ongoing, the telescope still appears to be working quite well, but the collision had a “marginally detectable effect on the data,” Nasa said in a statement. The object struck one of the pieces of the mirror that allow the telescope to operate sometime between May 23 and 25, the space agency said in a statement. NASA said the telescope was built to withstand such shocks, even if the piece of rock was larger than expected. During the construction process, the researchers used a mixture of simulations and actual impacts on mirror pieces to see how the telescope could withstand impacts with particles flying at very high speeds in space, he said. “We always knew Webb would have to overcome the space environment, which includes hard ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional micrometeorological impacts into our solar system,” said Paul Geithner. . Technical Deputy Project Director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed and built the Webb with a margin of performance – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure that it can accomplish its ambitious scientific mission even after many years in space.” The space telescope is also able to deal with any collisions by moving its mirrors to correct any problems with specific parts. It has already moved to deal with the conflict and further fine adjustments are needed, he said. The telescope is also able to move on its own in space, so that engineers can remove its most sensitive parts from the path of known meteor showers. However, the particle that hit the telescope was not part of such a well-known rain, and Nasa believes further research is inevitable. Over time, however, the telescope will inevitably be hit by more solid objects in space, degrading its performance. This process is to be expected, and Nasa is simply hoping that the telescope’s performance will be high enough that even with the downgrade it will be able to prove useful for years to come. “With Webb mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeorological impacts would gradually degrade the telescope’s performance over time,” said Lee Feinberg, director of Webb optical telescope data at NASA Goddard. “Since the launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeorological impacts that were in line with expectations and the most recent one that is larger than we anticipate in our downgrade predictions. “We will use this flight data to update our performance analysis over time and also develop business approaches to ensure that we maximize Webb visualization performance to the best of our ability for many years to come.”
