Expensive Space Telescope Damaged by Small Space Rock

Small rock, big problem.

expensive problems

more than $800 Million Space Telescope It was damaged by a small piece of space debris.

in press releaseThe European Space Agency has admitted that the Gaia spacecraft was damaged in April by a fast-moving “micrometeoroid,” described as a very small piece of space rock, which damaged its protective outer shell.

As the European Space Agency notes, these types of grain-sized meteoroids burn up in Earth’s atmosphere every day, but, The impact was much greater.

“Here, far from our planet’s protective atmosphere, Gaia often encounters particles like this. Collisions are expected, and the spacecraft is designed to withstand them,” the statement explained. “But this object hit Gaia at a very high speed and at exactly the wrong angle, damaging the spacecraft’s protective covering.”

The damage caused a small gap in the telescope’s outer layer that eventually allowed sunlight in, which, although much less intense than the ultraviolet light we get here on Earth, still harmed Gaia’s sensors.

Insult to injury

While dealing with this problem, ESA technicians ran into another one in May when one of the 106 charge-coupled devices (CCDs), or sensors that convert light into electrical signals and that form the basis of Gaia’s billion-pixel camera, experienced a mysterious technical failure.

The affected CCD, as the agency describes it, deals with star detection. Without it, Gaia can’t confirm what it’s looking at, which hampers its ability to do its job.

Adding insult to injury, Gaia had recently been hit by the same solar storm that caused the spectacular aurora borealis to appear around the world, and while she could usually withstand it, her injuries may have made her more vulnerable to failure.

Despite this knockout blow, these problems occurred more than four years after Gaia’s expected obsolescence.

So far, ESA experts have managed to modify the aging spacecraft’s software to “significantly reduce the number of false detections” and return it to routine operations, but ESA has warned that the solar storm could be the “last straw.”

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