Hackaday Link: 24 July 2022
Okay, maybe it won’t work right away. NASA has released a more detailed analysis of the damage suffered by the James Webb Space Telescope in a clash with a micrometeoroid, and considers the damage “irreparable”. Not that any damage to the JWST could be repaired, at least in the sense that the Hubble Space Telescope could be equipped with optics to repair its precisely grounded but inaccurately grounded main mirror. JWST is too far for a service call, so the correction in this case refers to a combination of what can be achieved by changing the shape and position of the affected mirror segment, and what can be handled with image processing. Damage to segment C3, as well as damage to other segments in a total of six collisions in Webb’s half year at the station, was assessed via “wavefront sensing”, which looks at how out-of-phase the light coming from each mirror segment is. The damage sounds terrible, and it certainly hurts the technicians and engineers who lovingly and painstakin