Mark Megahan
Parts of our $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope are offline. Important ones related to the Mid-Infrared Instrument cluster. This has nothing to do with the meteorite which chipped mirror segment C3 before it even went online.
James Webb not working
Our beloved James Webb Space Telescope is a long way from Mother Earth and crippled but it’s still doing science. There aren’t any plans on the horizon for a service mission, like the one they’re planning for Hubble, even though the wounded ultra-high tech platform is the latest and greatest thing in astronomical technology.
Engineers drove themselves to the edge of nervous breakdown trying to figure out how to fit the huge mirror assembly into the profile of a rocket. One which could get it where it needed to go. Then the mirror had to unfold itself into proper shape once it arrived, autonomously.
Everything went flawlessly. The smooth ballet of technological origami worked exactly as planned. The next step was to let Webb chill out for a while. In order for the specialized instruments to work properly, they have to be cooled down to a tiny hair above absolute zero. -446.8 Fahrenheit. They did that.
Then, a tiny speck of space dust traveling really fast from an unexpected direction vaporized itself on an important mirror segment. “That’s okay,” the engineers grimaced from the ground. They expected that sooner or later. Still, they weren’t happy it happened so soon.
For a few weeks now, despite the dinged mirror, Webb has been beaming home spectacular images and data that exceeded all expectations. The harsh space environment suddenly caused a new glitch.
NASA is not happy to report that “a mechanism that supports one of the four modes of the instrument known as Medium-Resolution Spectroscopy” is starting to “display technical glitches.” The platform’s “medium-resolution spectroscopy showed increased friction during setup for a science observation on August 4.”
Rubbed the wrong way
Friction isn’t a good thing in zero tolerance precision engineering. NASA instantly started running diagnostics. They’re conducting “preliminary health checks and investigations into the issue.”
They also set up an “anomaly review board.” They hope to restore normal function but for now, “the Webb team has paused scheduling observations using this particular observing mode.”
The problem part is a “grating wheel that allows scientists to select between short, medium, and longer wavelengths when making observations using the MRS mode.”
That’s pretty much the biggest reason why the telescope is there. Webb engineers are “now analyzing the behavior of the observatory.” They can’t figure out how to fix it until they figure out what broke.
The Webb scientists assure the public that the “observatory is in good health, and MIRI’s other three observing modes imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and coronagraph are operating normally and remain available for science observations.”
MIRI, they explain, “is used to produce mid-infrared images and spectra with an unprecedented combination of sharpness and sensitivity.“
