Before Impact
After Impact
-PJ
Before Impact
After Impact
-PJ
Perhaps God doesn’t want his photo taken?
It was designed by PHD “experts” who “knew what they were doing”.
They didn’t know about those little objects moving about in space?
Ouch...
Danged mosquitos!
“Relax, all right? My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.”
sun-earth L2 is a dust magnet. Hopefully they got the risk assessment and mitigation right. Space exploration is a domain where engineering is hard (Webb is a million miles outward from Earth!), but as we can see, the payoff is fabulous, especially with pushing the state of art in engineering.
At this point astronomers and astrophysicists and planetary scientists (all those exo disciplines) should be thinking about extra-terrestrial platforms for almost everything new. There’s other L2 points in the outer solar system that could conceivably support more observatories, and there may also exist useful material around those points for in-situ-resource-utilization.
Further out, even though it’s super difficult, a mission to the solar gravitational lens at 542+ AU would have a tremendous payoff.
Was this a woke impact from those who decided that Web was racist? sarc/
One of the big problems launching something into a Lagrange point is theory says they tend to collect lots of junk.
Not good to lose a mirror so quickly in the mission. They may have not modeled the L2 debris density correctly.
Presumably they are prioritizing the most interesting targets first in any case, as you would when you have no guarantee of a working instrument from one day to the next.
Putin’s fault.
Back to the old drawing board 🤪
Shields! Scotty, I need those shields!
Just send someone up there and Flex Glue that bitch!!