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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

Time to see how much damage that micrometeoroid did.

A man fired multiple bullets into a telescope and put many holes in the primary mirror, but the science capabilities were only minimally affected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_J._Smith_Telescope

This telescope design already has a giant hole in the middle, and the light-collecting capabilities are hardly affected by small holes.

I think it's kind of like how FaceID or TouchID work regardless of orientation of face/fingerprint. Or how locating a radio source from data across multiple detectors would utilize math and any damage would drop out as slightly more noise. Modern cameras often have dead pixels in their detectors but they're just skipped in the output photos.

I have several telescopes and I have dropped things in the mirrors quite often. The decrease in quality from a damaged mirror is almost zero. You only lose a tiny part of the total surface. Is not like hubble that had the wrong shape. A tiny speck in the mirror is likely undetectable. Even a bigger one wont affect that much.

I'm pretty sure that if there was any bad news they'd be managing expectations.

This is the quiet of confidence, I think :)

Here's to hoping :D

It's like when you get a new phone and scratch the screen just taking the screen cover off.

As long as it didn’t hit any of the actuator mechanism my guess is it probably will just add a bit of noise/bias that they can largely eliminate.

https://practicalastrophotography.com/a-brief-guide-to-calib...

Statistically speaking, it's quite concerning that such a large hit has occurred so soon after launch and thus does not bode well for the predicted lifespan of the telescope.

We pray it was an extreme outlier.

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