Free Republic

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...

by Jeff Foust — August 30, 2018 Soyuz MS-09 The ISS crew traced the leak to a small hole in the orbital module, the top section of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. Credit: NASA WASHINGTON — As the crew of the International Space Station worked Aug. 30 to fix, at least temporarily, a minor air leak, the incident illustrated the growing orbital debris risk to the outpost and strains in American and Russian approaches to ISS operations. NASA, in a statement early Aug. 30, said that controllers first noticed a minor drop in air pressure within the station at around 7...