All articles tagged with #micrometeoroid
During commissioning in May 2022, a dust-sized micrometeoroid struck JWST's primary mirror segment C3, leaving a deformation that could not be fully corrected by its actuators, but the telescope remained within optical requirements thanks to nanometre-scale wavefront sensing that diagnosed the change and guided partial correction and adjusted operations.
A Soyuz spacecraft returned to Earth without any crew after suffering a significant coolant leak while docked at the International Space Station (ISS) last December. The capsule was deemed too risky to use to bring home three crewmembers in case its interior heated up to a dangerous level as it entered Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. NASA’s Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, which operates the Soyuz spacecraft, was still keen to bring it to Earth as they’d like to examine it to try to determine what exactly caused the leak. The current thinking is that the capsule may have been struck by a micrometeoroid while docked at the station.