JWST Mirrors

[Daryl Dobbs]

Usual alarmist headlines in the press recently concerning the NASA paper on the recent micrometeorite strike on the JWST, most reports mention an arXiv paper but doesn’t mention the link, however here it is;
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf

section 4.7 is interesting as it seems most news media reports have copied and pasted various bits, interesting to read NASA isn’t sure if the May 2022 strike was a rare event only occurring perhaps once in several years or the computer modeling underestimated it.

Largest list of contributors I’ve ever seen!

[Paul Anthony Brierley]

The mirrors being open to the space environment was something that worried me. I also wonder why they didn’t implement the same tech for cleaning the mirrors as we all have in our DSLR cameras?

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Implementation: extra mass, cost, complexity and failure modes all have to be weighed against the benefits of adding them.

Not worth it, in other words.

[Author]

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