NASA's meteor avoidance plan for James Webb Space Telescope: Turn it around
Special dispensation is available for observations that are time-critical, but such requests"will need to be strongly justified, and may be rejected if the demand for such observations is too high," the STScI said.
Lee Feinberg, Webb's optical telescope element manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said that micrometeoroids striking the Webb mirror head on have twice the relative velocity and four times the kinetic energy of a less direct impact."Avoiding this direction when feasible will help extend the exquisite optical performance for decades," Feinberg said.
The May impact struck with enough force to be beyond what teams on the ground could have tested, NASA said at the time. Micrometeoroids are often smaller than one millimeter in diameter, but because they hit with an average impact velocity of 10kps – or 36,000kph/22,320mph – they can leave craters visible to the naked eye.
The JWST, with its unprotected central mirror, is exposed to all the hazards of space and the damage that comes with them. That makes its observations far superior to the well-insulated Hubble, but far less resilient. As such, NASA only plans for the JWST to last five years, though it hopes the mirror will remain intact enough to make it a reliable observatory for at least a decade. Let's hope future fixes are as simple as turning the telescope to face a different direction. ®
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