17 ms·

James Webb Space Telescope hit by a tiny meteorite

156 points by huhtenberg 4y ago

technothrasher 4y ago
Just a tiny nitpick, "meteoroid" and "meteorite" are not the same thing. The BBC article gets it right, but the title here is wrong.
- freetime2 4y ago
  For anyone who may be wondering what the difference is: > When a meteoroid survives a trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it's called a meteorite. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/meteors-and-meteorites/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/me...
jliptzin 4y ago
I have always wondered, let’s say we eventually invent some technology that allows us to travel through space at .1c or .5c or even .99c, wouldn’t the ship colliding with a tiny piece of space dust/debris rip the whole thing apart at that speed?
- monk_e_boy 4y ago
  Yes. https://www.quora.com/In-movies-spaceships-often-accelerate-to-lightspeed-Why-dont-they-ever-collide-with-any-objects-in-space-while-moving-so-fast https://www.quora.com/In-movies-spaceships-often-accelerate-...
- kadoban 4y ago
  Definitely. There's a scifi story I read some years back with relatavistic space travel and battle where the primary weapon they'd use is dust.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  yeah hopefully by the time we're traveling that fast we have energy shields
huhtenberg 4y ago
The source - https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-endure-micrometeoroid-impacts/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en... As a result of this impact, a specialized team of engineers has been formed to look at ways to mitigate the effects of further micrometeoroid hits of this scale. It sounds like they weren't expecting this happening so soon after the launch.
- Termitiono 4y ago
  Not sure we're you getting this from. They made plenty of simulation s and probably enough around this topic. They had enough time after all
  - huhtenberg 4y ago
    They had a ton of time indeed, but they didn't cover this particular eventuality. It's literally in the same post. Perhaps give it a read? Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed.
    - Termitiono 4y ago
      This still doesn't indicate anything. It doesn't say how much bigger. My point I'm trying to make: the original comment indicates to me that we need to worry. For me it conveys much more speculation than I think is reasonable right now. For example they were also not expecting to have such a great optical resolution.
      - BobbyJo 4y ago
        > This still doesn't indicate anything. It does indicate something. It indicates that > they weren't expecting this to happen so soon after the launch The delta matters, but no matter the delta, the fact that it defied expectation stands.
mola 4y ago
Should've installed a deflector dish... ;)
dotancohen 4y ago
If this incident happened 5 months after getting to C3, can we expect that on average we should see a similar collision event every few months, on the order of one to three (detected) collisions per year?
- Beltiras 4y ago
  A single incident will not give you any sort of sense for how often this happens. It could be luck either way. Might be this was a relatively calm period and it happens way more often in the future or incredibly unlucky and we never see another event for the rest of the mission.
  - conqueso 4y ago
    Fwiw, the article mentions this was the fifth time it's been hit.
    - Beltiras 4y ago
      This being the most serious of the incidents.
  - Patient0 4y ago
    I think this is too pessimistic. One always gains some information, even from a single event. If you're catching the bus one and shows up literally the minute that you arrive at the bus stop, yes, you may have been very fortunate and in fact the bus runs only once per day, but you really ought to assign a lower probability to that possibility now, given your recent single new piece of information. There are ways to express this quantitatively too - but your own intuition ought to be enough of a guide here.
    - mr_mitm 4y ago
      This is classical Bayesian inference. You update your priors when new information comes in. If something happens that you thought was unlikely, you update your credence about this event.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Tangential question, but how is high speed space travel supposed to work with tiny space debris like this? You hear a lot about how a small constant acceleration can get you to effective speeds for galaxy hopping over time, but doesn't extreme velocity make tiny objects like this a massive threat? Like orders of magnitude larger than they are for current space vehicles? Is that a solveable problem?
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Well as big an issue is the energy required, ie., acceleration requires energy and your mass isnt constant as you increase velocity. So by the time you're anywhere near "galaxy hopping" you're requiring near infinite amounts of energy. Also note that there really isnt any "galaxy hopping" speed. The speed of light is incredibly slow compared to space distances. Even travelling at light, you're not getting many places in a human life time.
  - brabel 4y ago
    You can actually cross the whole galaxy in a lifetime if you get really close to light speed, but measuring time from the perspective of your ship... for everyone on Earth, due to time dilation, it would take you hundreds of thousands of years though :(. Notice that if you could travel exactly at light speed, time would cease to exist and you could get anywhere in the universe instantly, as light itself experiences no time.
    - misja111 4y ago
      > Notice that if you could travel exactly at light speed, time would cease to exist and you could get anywhere in the universe instantly, as light itself experiences no time. This is not true. The easiest way to see why, is to realize that speed is relative: there is no difference in considering the observer to move with the speed of light towards the foton, or the foton to move with the speed of light towards the observer. Yet as you know, we observe light all the time and still we experience time.
BurningFrog 4y ago
I've been wondering if the Lagrange Point attracts more things to collide with?
- ianai 4y ago
  They said parking it at L2 was akin to giving your car just enough speed at the bottom of a hill to exactly come to rest at the top of the hill. Given that mental model, I think L2 wouldn’t be a natural point for things to congregate. It’s not a gravity well, but a gravity “dimple”? Or local minimum? But it sounds like this is so new to us that humility is warranted and probably dangerous to neglect. Edit-they did say they’ve done simulations and they did expect small collisions. It sounds like this was much larger than expected for this point in time, but not catastrophically so. Edit2-also they’re not at L2 but in orbit around it. The lifetime of the craft is in part limited by how many course corrections it will take to stay in their orbit. That really makes me think this should be rarer.
  - samatman 4y ago
    L1-3 are saddle points, convergent on the tangent plane between the two stellar bodies and divergent on the normal axis.
    - ianai 4y ago
      Seems like being divergent on any access would push matter away over time.
      - leephillips 4y ago
        It does, which is why, as a commenter above mentioned, the Telescope needs to burn fuel to remain in orbit around the Lagrange point.
      - samatman 4y ago
        Space outside of Lagrange points and gravity wells isn't attractive along any axis, the unstable Lagrange points have a plane which allows unstable orbits which have longer or shorter durations, depending on how exactly aligned with that plane the vector is. We should expect more junk, not necessarily a lot more, and this is of course simulated in the models used to design JWT... but not necessarily with perfect fidelity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
conqueso 4y ago
I'm curious about the nature of the damage. article mentions that the affected mirror will be adjusted to minimize the distortion that was introduced, so obviously not a crack. So, more like a tiny scratch? It's hard for me to conceptualize the impact of hypersonic dust on a mirror
- shrx 4y ago
  How do you define "hypersonic" in a vacuum?
  - conqueso 4y ago
    Ha! Greater than 0 m/s I suppose - so still technically accurate :-P
  - MisterTea 4y ago
    >1715 m/s same as in air but without the air.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    In space, nobody can year you go transsonic...
- adriand 4y ago
  More like a tiny crater or pockmark, although they don’t say exactly how large the meteoroid was or how much damage it caused. Apparently “micrometeoroid” refers to objects with less than a gram of mass, although I assume that this one was likely significantly less heavy than a gram, which is the case for most.
- temp0826 4y ago
  Should've paid the extra billion for the wiper blade package
  - diseasedyak 4y ago
    Throw a few dozen Rain-X wipers from AutoZone on that baby, she'd be good.
rjh29 4y ago
This is like when I scratched my new monitor right after buying it. Except the monitor costs 10 billion dollars.
gtsnexp 4y ago
Question that pops to mind: Was the Hubble telescope ever hit by one such tiny corpuscles?
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  Yes! The solar panels were made by ESA and replaced twice. The old ones are hanging on a wall at ESA in the Netherlands and you can see micrometeorite damage with the naked eye!
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    There's a picture at [1] but its hard to know what the scale is [1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/05/ESA_built-solar_cells_retrieved_from_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope_in_2002 https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/05/ESA_built-...
    - gtsnexp 4y ago
      That looks brutal!
      - sillysaurusx 4y ago
        Echoing this. That’s a level of damage that seems hard to prepare for. Even the smaller one towards the lower center seems like it would cause havoc for camera equipment.
    - johnwalkr 4y ago
      The long edge of one cell is probably 4-8cm long. It’s in that ballpark anyway.
    - irthomasthomas 4y ago
      Another photo says the hole is 2.5mm https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2005/03/Hubble_solar_panel_damage https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2005/03/Hubble_sol...
    - 4y ago
XCSme 4y ago
> The speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant. > Webb has an open design; its mirrors are not guarded by the kind of tubular baffle seen on other space telescopes, such as Hubble. So previous telescopes did have more protection against this kind of events. The good part is: > The damage inflicted by the dust-sized micrometeoroid is producing a noticeable effect in the observatory's data but is not expected to limit the mission's overall performance.
- gruturo 4y ago
  >> Webb has an open design; its mirrors are not guarded by the kind of tubular baffle seen on other space telescopes, such as Hubble. >So previous telescopes did have more protection against this kind of events. I would expect Webb to be less vulnerable though, due to the open design. So many possible trajectories would just go through the empty space between the beams and trusses (sorry for using the wrong terminology) and not hit anything at all?
  - Rastonbury 4y ago
    It would be the same for like hubble, any trajectory will just hit the tube
sph 4y ago
- "But Senator Collins why did the front of the telescope fall off?" - "Well a meteorite hit it." - "A meteorite hit it?" - "A meteorite hit the telescope!" - "Is that unusual?" - "Oh yeah! In space? Chance in a million!"
teslaberri 4y ago
what if it was aliens testing our equipment. Throwing rocks disguised as space dust to throw us off thinking it was a natural signal. James Webb might find aliens. or there might already be aliens in the james webb space program. or both.

156 points by huhtenberg 4y ago

Just a tiny nitpick, "meteoroid" and "meteorite" are not the same thing. The BBC article gets it right, but the title here is wrong.

freetime2 4y ago
For anyone who may be wondering what the difference is: > When a meteoroid survives a trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it's called a meteorite. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/meteors-and-meteorites/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/me...

jliptzin 4y ago

I have always wondered, let’s say we eventually invent some technology that allows us to travel through space at .1c or .5c or even .99c, wouldn’t the ship colliding with a tiny piece of space dust/debris rip the whole thing apart at that speed?

monk_e_boy 4y ago
Yes. https://www.quora.com/In-movies-spaceships-often-accelerate-to-lightspeed-Why-dont-they-ever-collide-with-any-objects-in-space-while-moving-so-fast https://www.quora.com/In-movies-spaceships-often-accelerate-...
kadoban 4y ago
Definitely. There's a scifi story I read some years back with relatavistic space travel and battle where the primary weapon they'd use is dust.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
yeah hopefully by the time we're traveling that fast we have energy shields

huhtenberg 4y ago

The source - https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-endure-micrometeoroid-impacts/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en... As a result of this impact, a specialized team of engineers has been formed to look at ways to mitigate the effects of further micrometeoroid hits of this scale. It sounds like they weren't expecting this happening so soon after the launch.

Termitiono 4y ago
Not sure we're you getting this from. They made plenty of simulation s and probably enough around this topic. They had enough time after all
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  They had a ton of time indeed, but they didn't cover this particular eventuality. It's literally in the same post. Perhaps give it a read? Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed.
  - Termitiono 4y ago
    This still doesn't indicate anything. It doesn't say how much bigger. My point I'm trying to make: the original comment indicates to me that we need to worry. For me it conveys much more speculation than I think is reasonable right now. For example they were also not expecting to have such a great optical resolution.
    - BobbyJo 4y ago
      > This still doesn't indicate anything. It does indicate something. It indicates that > they weren't expecting this to happen so soon after the launch The delta matters, but no matter the delta, the fact that it defied expectation stands.

mola 4y ago

Should've installed a deflector dish... ;)

dotancohen 4y ago

If this incident happened 5 months after getting to C3, can we expect that on average we should see a similar collision event every few months, on the order of one to three (detected) collisions per year?

Beltiras 4y ago
A single incident will not give you any sort of sense for how often this happens. It could be luck either way. Might be this was a relatively calm period and it happens way more often in the future or incredibly unlucky and we never see another event for the rest of the mission.
- conqueso 4y ago
  Fwiw, the article mentions this was the fifth time it's been hit.
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    This being the most serious of the incidents.
- Patient0 4y ago
  I think this is too pessimistic. One always gains some information, even from a single event. If you're catching the bus one and shows up literally the minute that you arrive at the bus stop, yes, you may have been very fortunate and in fact the bus runs only once per day, but you really ought to assign a lower probability to that possibility now, given your recent single new piece of information. There are ways to express this quantitatively too - but your own intuition ought to be enough of a guide here.
  - mr_mitm 4y ago
    This is classical Bayesian inference. You update your priors when new information comes in. If something happens that you thought was unlikely, you update your credence about this event.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Tangential question, but how is high speed space travel supposed to work with tiny space debris like this? You hear a lot about how a small constant acceleration can get you to effective speeds for galaxy hopping over time, but doesn't extreme velocity make tiny objects like this a massive threat? Like orders of magnitude larger than they are for current space vehicles? Is that a solveable problem?

mjburgess 4y ago
Well as big an issue is the energy required, ie., acceleration requires energy and your mass isnt constant as you increase velocity. So by the time you're anywhere near "galaxy hopping" you're requiring near infinite amounts of energy. Also note that there really isnt any "galaxy hopping" speed. The speed of light is incredibly slow compared to space distances. Even travelling at light, you're not getting many places in a human life time.
- brabel 4y ago
  You can actually cross the whole galaxy in a lifetime if you get really close to light speed, but measuring time from the perspective of your ship... for everyone on Earth, due to time dilation, it would take you hundreds of thousands of years though :(. Notice that if you could travel exactly at light speed, time would cease to exist and you could get anywhere in the universe instantly, as light itself experiences no time.
  - misja111 4y ago
    > Notice that if you could travel exactly at light speed, time would cease to exist and you could get anywhere in the universe instantly, as light itself experiences no time. This is not true. The easiest way to see why, is to realize that speed is relative: there is no difference in considering the observer to move with the speed of light towards the foton, or the foton to move with the speed of light towards the observer. Yet as you know, we observe light all the time and still we experience time.

BurningFrog 4y ago

I've been wondering if the Lagrange Point attracts more things to collide with?

ianai 4y ago
They said parking it at L2 was akin to giving your car just enough speed at the bottom of a hill to exactly come to rest at the top of the hill. Given that mental model, I think L2 wouldn’t be a natural point for things to congregate. It’s not a gravity well, but a gravity “dimple”? Or local minimum? But it sounds like this is so new to us that humility is warranted and probably dangerous to neglect. Edit-they did say they’ve done simulations and they did expect small collisions. It sounds like this was much larger than expected for this point in time, but not catastrophically so. Edit2-also they’re not at L2 but in orbit around it. The lifetime of the craft is in part limited by how many course corrections it will take to stay in their orbit. That really makes me think this should be rarer.
- samatman 4y ago
  L1-3 are saddle points, convergent on the tangent plane between the two stellar bodies and divergent on the normal axis.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Seems like being divergent on any access would push matter away over time.
    - leephillips 4y ago
      It does, which is why, as a commenter above mentioned, the Telescope needs to burn fuel to remain in orbit around the Lagrange point.
    - samatman 4y ago
      Space outside of Lagrange points and gravity wells isn't attractive along any axis, the unstable Lagrange points have a plane which allows unstable orbits which have longer or shorter durations, depending on how exactly aligned with that plane the vector is. We should expect more junk, not necessarily a lot more, and this is of course simulated in the models used to design JWT... but not necessarily with perfect fidelity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

conqueso 4y ago

I'm curious about the nature of the damage. article mentions that the affected mirror will be adjusted to minimize the distortion that was introduced, so obviously not a crack. So, more like a tiny scratch? It's hard for me to conceptualize the impact of hypersonic dust on a mirror

shrx 4y ago
How do you define "hypersonic" in a vacuum?
- conqueso 4y ago
  Ha! Greater than 0 m/s I suppose - so still technically accurate :-P
- MisterTea 4y ago
  >1715 m/s same as in air but without the air.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  In space, nobody can year you go transsonic...
adriand 4y ago
More like a tiny crater or pockmark, although they don’t say exactly how large the meteoroid was or how much damage it caused. Apparently “micrometeoroid” refers to objects with less than a gram of mass, although I assume that this one was likely significantly less heavy than a gram, which is the case for most.
temp0826 4y ago
Should've paid the extra billion for the wiper blade package
- diseasedyak 4y ago
  Throw a few dozen Rain-X wipers from AutoZone on that baby, she'd be good.

rjh29 4y ago

This is like when I scratched my new monitor right after buying it. Except the monitor costs 10 billion dollars.

gtsnexp 4y ago

Question that pops to mind: Was the Hubble telescope ever hit by one such tiny corpuscles?

johnwalkr 4y ago
Yes! The solar panels were made by ESA and replaced twice. The old ones are hanging on a wall at ESA in the Netherlands and you can see micrometeorite damage with the naked eye!
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  There's a picture at [1] but its hard to know what the scale is [1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/05/ESA_built-solar_cells_retrieved_from_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope_in_2002 https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2009/05/ESA_built-...
  - gtsnexp 4y ago
    That looks brutal!
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      Echoing this. That’s a level of damage that seems hard to prepare for. Even the smaller one towards the lower center seems like it would cause havoc for camera equipment.
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    The long edge of one cell is probably 4-8cm long. It’s in that ballpark anyway.
  - irthomasthomas 4y ago
    Another photo says the hole is 2.5mm https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2005/03/Hubble_solar_panel_damage https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2005/03/Hubble_sol...
  - 4y ago

XCSme 4y ago

> The speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant. > Webb has an open design; its mirrors are not guarded by the kind of tubular baffle seen on other space telescopes, such as Hubble. So previous telescopes did have more protection against this kind of events. The good part is: > The damage inflicted by the dust-sized micrometeoroid is producing a noticeable effect in the observatory's data but is not expected to limit the mission's overall performance.

gruturo 4y ago
>> Webb has an open design; its mirrors are not guarded by the kind of tubular baffle seen on other space telescopes, such as Hubble. >So previous telescopes did have more protection against this kind of events. I would expect Webb to be less vulnerable though, due to the open design. So many possible trajectories would just go through the empty space between the beams and trusses (sorry for using the wrong terminology) and not hit anything at all?
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  It would be the same for like hubble, any trajectory will just hit the tube

sph 4y ago

- "But Senator Collins why did the front of the telescope fall off?" - "Well a meteorite hit it." - "A meteorite hit it?" - "A meteorite hit the telescope!" - "Is that unusual?" - "Oh yeah! In space? Chance in a million!"

teslaberri 4y ago

what if it was aliens testing our equipment. Throwing rocks disguised as space dust to throw us off thinking it was a natural signal. James Webb might find aliens. or there might already be aliens in the james webb space program. or both.