Knormal posted:

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

Lol what the gently caress was that

Panic! At The Tesco posted:

there's gotta be some alien pigs out there with massive balls

MuscaDomestica posted:

Even more so if we find pollution in the atmosphere.

Bula Vinaka posted:

That's not good... it's only been deployed for a short while so far, so it's probably going to get more strikes like this.

Edit:

"Engineers are still modeling how frequently such events will occur. "It is not yet clear whether the May 2022 hit to segment C3 was a rare event," the team wrote. By "rare," they said it is possible that they happened to get a high-energy impact that should statistically happen only once every few years.

Alternatively, it may be that Webb is "more susceptible to damage by micrometeoroids than pre-launch modeling predicted," the team wrote. Modeling is ongoing to estimate the hazardous population of micrometeoroids and to figure out remedies, such as restricting pointing direction.

One remedy could be minimizing the amount of time Webb points directly into its orbital direction, "which statistically has higher micrometeoroid rates and energies," the team wrote.

Main mirror performance is assessed by how much it deforms starlight, according to Astronomy magazine, and measured using what scientists call wavefront error root mean square. When Webb's mission began, the affected C3 segment had a wavefront error of 56 nanometers rms, which was in line with the 17 other mirror portions.

Post-impact, however, the error increased to 258 nm rms, but realignments to the mirror segments as a whole reduced the overall impact to just 59 nm rms. For the time being, the team wrote Webb's alignment is well within performance limits, as the realigned mirror segments are "about 5-10 nm rms above the previous best wavefront error rms values."

From https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-micrometeoroid-damage.

Snowy posted: