A tiny meteoroid struck the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope in May, knocking one of its gold-plated mirrors out of alignment but not changing the orbiting observatory's schedule to become fully operational shortly, NASA said on Wednesday.
The little space rock hit the $10 billion telescope sometime in late May and left a small but noticeable effect in the telescope's data, NASA said in a statement, adding that it was the fifth and largest hit to the telescope since its December launch.
Webb parked itself in a solar orbit roughly a million miles from Earth in January and is expected to yield its first full-color images of the cosmos in July.Webb's mirror was engineered to withstand bombardment with dust-sized particles flying at extreme velocities in space, but the most recent impact was "larger than was modeled and beyond what the team could have tested on the ground," NASA said.
Engineers designed the telescope to withstand occasional impacts from micrometeoroids - tiny space rocks traveling at ultra fast speeds during predicted meteor showers near Webb's location in space.
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