NASA’S $10billion James Webb Space Telescope has suffered damage after a meteoroid struck its mirrors.
The US space agency was aware of the impact in May but has just released a paper and images.
The damage is visible in the bottom right of the right-hand image[/caption]
The telescope has huge mirrors that are in danger of being hit by space rocks[/caption]
Some damage is visible in the bottom right-hand image of the released snapshot.
There’s no need to panic about the telescope yet though as Nasa has actually accounted for impact scenarios.
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021.
It’s the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope and it cost around $10billion (£7.3billion).
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The telescope is now fully deployed, which means it’s finally unfurled its huge mirrors and the sun shield that will help it look for signs of life in the universe.
The telescope is essentially a massive mirror that can use infrared to see way beyond what we’ve seen before.
However, having a mirror this large floating around space could be problematic given the number of meteorites that can hit it.
Unfortunately, the space telescope was struck on one of its 18 mirrors by a micrometeoroid.
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Nasa said that the micrometeoroid “caused a significant uncorrectable change in the overall figure of that segment”.
However, the rest of the telescope should function as normal.
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The telescope is still performing successfully despite the damage.
It just found the oldest galaxy ever seen in the universe.
