A tiny meteoroid slammed into the newly installed James Webb Space Telescope in May, causing one of its gold-plated mirrors to misalign, but not altering the orbital observatory’s operational schedule, NASA announced Wednesday. ).
The tiny fragment of space rock hit the $10 billion telescope sometime near the end of May and had a small but noticeable effect on the telescope’s data, NASA said in a statement, adding that it was the fifth and largest meteoroid. to hit the telescope since it was launched in December.
“After initial assessments, the team concluded that the telescope is still operating at a level that exceeds all mission requirements,” NASA said. “Complete analyzes and measurements continue to be made.”
Engineers began a delicate readjustment of the impacted mirror segment to help cancel out some of the distortion caused by the micrometeoroid, according to NASA.
In January, the Webb telescope positioned itself in solar orbit at approximately 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. He is expected to produce his first color images of the cosmos in July.
“This recent impact has not caused any change to Webb’s operational schedule,” NASA said.
Webb’s mirror was built to withstand bombardments from particles the size of dust grains flying through space at extreme speeds, but, according to NASA, the latest impact “was larger than predicted in the models and exceeded what the team had predicted.” could have tested it on land”.
Run by NASA, the space telescope is considered the most powerful space observatory ever built, with an array of sensors and 18 gold-plated mirror segments working together to search for distant planets as well as galaxies from the early stages of the universe.
Engineers designed the telescope to withstand occasional impacts from micrometeoroids, i.e. tiny space rocks moving close to where Webb is in space at lightning-fast speeds during predicted meteor showers.
But according to NASA, last month’s micrometeoroid was not part of any meteor shower. Describing the impact as “a chance and inevitable event”, the US space agency said it had convened a team of engineers to study ways to prevent future impacts from similar space rocks.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. The main company involved in its construction was Northrop Grumman Corp NOC.N.
Translation by Clara Allain
