Posted on 06/19/2022 10:17:33 AM PDT by LibWhacker
In some ways, the last place you’d want to put the James Webb Space Telescope is, well, in space. If you owned a $10 billion car, you wouldn’t leave it out in a hail storm, and while there’s no hail in space, there are plenty of micrometeoroids—high speed debris no bigger than a dust grain but moving so fast they can pack a true destructive wallop. Every day, millions of such fragments rain down on Earth, but they incinerate in the atmosphere long before they reach the ground. The Webb, parked in a spot in space 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth, has no such protection. And as NASA and others have reported in the past week, its mirror—the heart of the space telescope—has already been dinged five times by tiny space flecks, the most recent of which has done real, but correctable, damage.
The Webb’s mirror is an exquisite piece of engineering. Measuring 6.5 m (21 ft., 4 in.) across, it’s made up of 18 hexagonal segments, each of which can be moved along seven different axes to allow controllers to focus the overall instrument. Together, the segments, made of beryllium, have an area of 25 sq. meters (269 sq. ft.). All of them are covered with reflective gold, but in a film so thin that if it were peeled off and tamped down into a sphere, it would measure no bigger than a golf ball. Meanwhile, the beryllium is so smoothly polished that if it were expanded to the size of the United States, its biggest imperfection would be 7.6 cm (3 in.). That’s a heck of a piece of hardware to leave exposed to the space elements. But if you’re going to do your work where Webb does, it’s a risk you have to take.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Why didn’t they put a strong shield in front of the mirrors to protect them?
Star Trek tech, please come to the rescue!
Shields up...
😁
Micrometeoroid Magnet
And it's only been parked there for a few months...Within a year or two, it could look like Swiss cheese.
Too much weight. These micro object are traveling a great speeds and it would take a hefty shield to protect. Then there is a problem with a shield affecting the optics of the primary mirror.
The whole purpose is to get Webb out there where we can get a better view of the universe than we can on the surface. Not sure how we could put a shield up that wouldn’t itself be very expensive, subject to damage and actually block our view instead of making it better. What kind of shield did you have in mind?
Lol
In addition, if the primary mirror could be shielded, a lot of impact marks on the shield could affect the optics.
Says to me that interstellar travel is not going to happen. It appears that at high speeds any big molecule is going to blast right through any space ship and its crew.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
It will eventually happen unless humans all kill each other off first, but I'd guess interstellar travel will not be accomplished by traditional rocket powered crafts but by another means. The distances are just far too great.
About 3/4 in plexiglass should do. Lol.
Definitely a huge consideration. But the general population is almost oblivious to the problem cause we watch science fiction space movies all the time and think space will be a safe playground. Most of our space dramas have the same superficial connection to reality as the 1950’s science fiction movies.
Interstellar travel through linear space is never going to be practical, or necessary. This doesn’t make much sense now but it will probably will in the next century.
We all know the fastest path across the ocean is not in a boat. At the beginning of the previous century, no one would have understood or believed that.
It does not need to be molecules - atoms and subatomic particles will do the same. A “starship” or even one traveling at very high speeds is like a target in a particle accelerator. The difference is the target - i.e., the spacecraft is moving at relativistic, near relativistic or even high speeds. The particle is essentially stationary. It’s estimated that deep space matter density is roughly 1 hydrogen atom (a proton!) per cubic centimeter (It’s likely higher!). The matter density would of course be higher in interstellar clouds. That hydrogen atom would be slamming into every square centimeter of the spacecraft’s hull. Then there’s electromagnetic radiation - gamma rays, etc. Everything with charge you could deflect with an electromagnetic field (Note that would draw from your spacecraft’s power source!) the photons, you have much more of a problem! Density of hull material only solution known now even that over time will be a problem, eventually it would absorb enough energy and radiate it back inside the craft. Huge huge engineering problems here!
“objects in mirror are closer than they appear”
Martians wrote this
You obviously don’t understand optics
Not true. But that’s ok. Just keep saying it
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