Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters] – NASA announced Wednesday that a tiny meteoroid caused damage to the James Webb Space Telescope’s recently deployed mirror. It knocked one of its silver-plated mirrors off alignment, but did not change the orbiting observatory’s scheduled for becoming fully operational soon.

NASA released a statement saying that the small space rock made it to the telescope at $10 billion in May. The telescope saw a slight but discernible effect.

NASA reported that the initial assessment showed the telescope performs at a level above all mission requirements. NASA continues to conduct thorough analysis and measurement.

NASA stated that engineers have started a careful readjustment on the impacted mirror section to “cancel out some of the distortion caused by the micrometeoroid.”

Webb placed itself approximately one million miles (11.6 million kilometers) away from Earth in January. In July, it is expected to produce the first fully-color photographs of the cosmos.

NASA stated that Webb was not affected by the impact.

Webb’s mirror was built to withstand the impact of dust-sized particles traveling at extremely high speeds in space. NASA stated that the last impact “larger than the model and beyond what they could have tested on ground.”

NASA manages the space telescope. It is considered the world’s most powerful space observatory. The instrument includes 18 mirror segments and a suite sensors that can be used to search for distant galaxies.

Engineers built the telescope to resist occasional impacts by micrometeoroids, tiny rocks from outer space traveling at extremely fast speeds during meteor showers predicted near Webb’s position in space.

NASA confirmed that last month’s impact was not caused by a meteor shower. NASA called the impact “an inevitable chance event” and said that it had now formed a group of engineers to look into ways to prevent future impacts by similar space rocks.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency lead an international collaboration to create this telescope. Northrop Grumman Corp (NYSE 🙂 was primary contractor.