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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 ment
by 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 agoL1-3 are saddle points, convergent on the tangent plane between the two stellar bodies and divergent on the normal axis.
- ianai 4y agoSeems like being divergent on any access would push matter away over time.
- leephillips 4y agoIt 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 agoSpace 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.