Weeks after being hit by a micrometeoroid, the landmark observatory prepares to release its first scientific images.
The mission team “invested a great deal of effort 20 years ago, to try to get their meteoroid environment right”, says Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s meteoroid environment office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Micrometeoroids are created by collisions between asteroids and other planetary bodies. The particles are usually as small as a few tens of micrometres across — the size of sand grains — but could be as big as a bus. The Sun’s gravity pulls particles towards it, so dust generally flows from the outer regions of the Solar System towards the inner parts.Even tiny particles can cause physical damage to spacecraft when they hit as fast as a speeding bullet — the velocities reached in space.
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