Rock the size of a speck of dust dents £7.5bn space telescope

A SPACE telescope on a mission to uncover the secrets of the stars has been damaged – by a tiny rock fragment.

The meteoroid, said to be no bigger than a speck of dust, struck Nasa’s £7.5billion James Webb craft in late May.

It knocked one of the 18 gold-plated tiles which make up the telescope’s 21ft-wide mirror out of alignment, causing a dimple and having a small but noticeable effect on data collection, the space agency said.

It is the fifth and largest collision suffered by the James Webb since it was launched in December to replace the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The mirror was engineered to withstand bombardment with dust-sized particles flying at extreme velocities in space but the most recent impact was ‘larger than was modelled and beyond what the team could have tested on the ground’, Nasa said. The micrometeoroid was not from any meteor shower but ‘an unavoidable chance event’, it added.

The James Webb, 100 times more powerful than Hubble, is in a solar orbit roughly a million miles from Earth and is expected to yield its first full-colour images of the cosmos next month. It carries the technology to look deeper into the universe, at light emitted millions of years ago.