詹姆斯韦布空间望远镜有了微流星体预测

The James Webb Space Telescope gets its own micrometeoroid forecast — here's how | Space

An artist's depiction of the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit: Kevin Gill)

Even as the James Webb Space Telescope is allowing astronomers to see inside vast, distant galaxies, it's also studying some tiny, nearby objects — albeit inadvertently.

JWST在对巨大、遥远的星系进行观测的时候，也在对附近一些微小的物体进行研究，虽然是无意的。

These are micrometeoroids, tiny mysteries zipping through the solar system at lightning speed. They're far too small for scientists to observe directly in deep space, but they shouldn't be ignored: Micrometeoroids can pack quite a punch, as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) can attest. Since JWST's Christmas 2021 launch, engineers have detected more than 20 micrometeoroid impacts to the telescope; only one noticeably hurt the observatory. The mission is adjusting its operations to reduce the frequency of micrometeoroid hits, but still, the impacts themselves are perhaps the least expected data from the powerhouse new observatory.

这些微小的物体叫做微流星体，以闪电般的速度在太阳系中穿行的神秘物体。它们太微小，很难直接观测到，但是它们也不能被忽略：微流星体可能给出有力一击，NASA的JWST就证明了这一点。JWST自从2021年圣诞节发射升空以来，被发现受到了超过20次微流星体的撞击，不过只有一次造成了明显的后果。目前任务管理部门正在调整其运行策略，以减少微流星体的撞击频率。不管怎样，撞击总不是这台性能强大的望远镜期望得到的结果。

"It is essentially a meteoroid flux detector, although not intentionally," Margaret Campbell-Brown, a meteor physicist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, told Space.com. "Although, of course, we're sad for them when their mirror gets hit by meteoroids."

加拿大西安大略大学的流星物理学家Margaret Campbell-Brown说：“JWST本质上可以看做一个微流星体探测器，尽管不是特意的。当然，我们对它被微流星体撞击也感到很遗憾。”

The JWST team briefly worried that it had underestimated the threat from these tiny particles in May 2022, when scientists saw a relatively large micrometeoroid hit on the observatory's massive golden mirror even before normal science observations had begun.

JWST的团队主要担心他们低估了这些微小颗粒的威胁，2022年5月，在正式的科学观测还没有开始之前，科学家们就在它巨大的镀金镜面上发现了较大的微流星体撞击。

But by the time the observatory marked the first anniversary of its Christmas 2021 launch, the team's confidence had returned: Scientists had determined the worrying micrometeoroid was large enough that they wouldn't expect to encounter such an object more than about once a year, and engineers had determined that the particle managed to hit a particularly vulnerable location.

但是，在JWST自从2021年圣诞节发射入轨并纪念其在轨一周年时，团队的信心又恢复回来了：科学家们认为前述那么大的微流星体撞击每年可能不会超过一次，而工程师们则认为那次撞击是正好撞到了一个特别脆弱的位置。

"For the most part, we've been getting about one to two a month that we can actually detect," Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for JWST at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com of the impacts. "At this point, it's really been a very minor thing."

NASA哥达德空间飞行中心的JWST光学镜单元管理人员Lee Feinberg说：“在大多数情况下，我们只有一到两个月是真正观测的时间。从这个角度说，撞击会是一个非常小的概率。”

However, JWST is now targeting perhaps two decades of operations, so the team has decided to play it safe, adapting its observation strategy to limit the amount of time the telescope will be vulnerable to the most energetic impacts. "We want those pictures of the Carina Nebula to look just as beautiful 20 years from now," Feinberg said.

And that means understanding micrometeoroids.

但是，JWST的目标是运行大约20年，因此望远镜团队决定，为了安全起见，调整它的观测策略，限制它容易被能量最大的微流星体撞击的时间范围。Feinberg说：“我们希望Carina星云能在20年后看上去和现在一样美丽”。

这意味着，我们需要了解微流星体。

An unusual observatory

一个不同寻常的望远镜

JWST is in a unique situation. The $10 billion observatory is perched at what scientists call the Earth-sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), which is about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth in the direction opposite the sun. L2 is one of the pockets of the solar system where gravitational tugs balance out, making it a relatively cheap outpost to occupy fuel-wise, and it's perfect for the telescope's high-power infrared optics that need protection from the sun.

JWST运行在一个独特的位置上。这台100亿美元造价的望远镜正好位于所谓的日-地拉格朗日点L2点，此处距离地球150万km，在相对于太阳的另一侧。L2点像是太阳系中的一个节省燃料、容易占据的前哨站，因为这里引力互相抵消。而且，对于望远镜需要避免太阳光照的高性能红外光学仪器来说，这里也是理想位置。

But scientists have sent only a few spacecraft to L2, and none of them had the vulnerability of JWST: The telescope's massive mirror is bared to space, and engineers keep an eye on its smoothness to help scientists understand their data. Compare that design with an observatory like the Hubble Space Telescope, which is sheathed by a tube that absorbs impacts with no visible scars.

"We're actually able to monitor this stuff at a level of detail that nobody's ever been able to do before," Feinberg said. 

但是目前只有几个航天器到达了L2点，其中没有任何一个像JWST这么脆弱：望远镜的巨大的镜面是裸露的，工程师一直在监测其表面的光滑度，因为这对科学家分析观测数据很重要。与哈勃太空望远镜的设计相比，后者的镜面被一个遮光筒保护，避免了撞击，不会产生撞击痕迹。Feinberg说：“我们确实能够监测表面光滑度，其精度是在此之前没有人能做到的”。

Despite the flurry of concern in May, engineers working on JWST knew all along that micrometeoroids would hit the observatory. "If you put anything out in space long enough, it's gonna get hit by something," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, told Space.com. "ISS [the International Space Station], Chandra, Hubble — you name a vehicle that's been up there for years, they've all been hit. Most of the hits are not significant to mission operations, but they do get hit."

尽管发生在五月的事情让人不安了一阵，JWST的工程师们一直清楚它肯定会被微流星体撞击。马歇尔空间飞行中心的微流星体环境办公室主任Bill Cooke说：“如果你把什么东西放在轨道上足够长的时间，它就会被撞。国际空间站、钱德拉望远镜、哈勃望远镜，你可以列出一些在轨多少年的航天器，它们都被撞击过。绝大部分撞击对任务来说影响都不大，但是它们确实被撞击过。”

Early in the JWST design process, mission personnel simulated micrometeoroid impacts on a mirror, although Feinberg noted that engineers don't have a way of accelerating tiny particles all the way to the speeds they reach in the solar system, so the experiments can't really mimic the power of an impact. Scientists also used the models they had at the time to get a sense of how many hits the observatory might experience during its planned five-year lifespan.

"That's kind of how we dealt with it from the point of view of developing JWST," Feinberg said. "And then, honestly, I don't know that I thought much about micrometeoroids and our mirrors until we were actually in space."

早在JWST开展设计的时候，任务专家就做试验模拟了微流星体撞击镜面的情况。Feinberg指出，工程师们还无法在实验室将微小的颗粒加速到它在天上具有的速度，所以试验不能真实模拟撞击的能量。科学家们也使用当时的计算机模型估计了JWST计划的5年寿命中可能受到多少次撞击。Feinberg说：“这是我们在研制JWST时针对微流星体采取的措施。从那以后，老实说，我不知道我想过多少关于微流星体的事情，直到望远镜被发射升空之后。”

找寻流星体

Spotting meteoroids

But while Feinberg and countless colleagues were making JWST a reality, meteor scientists were busy as well, honing their understanding of space around us.

当Feinberg和他无数的同事忙于将JWST变为现实，流星研究专家也在努力锤炼他们对周围太空的认识。

Scientists have determined that only about 10% of micrometeoroids are connected to the meteors we're most familiar with, those in streams that cause specific meteor showers like the Perseids or Leonids. The other 90% of micrometeoroids are what scientists call sporadics, which travel alone, zipping through the solar system on random orbits, which can make them more challenging to understand.

科学家们发现，只有大约10%的微流星体是和我们最熟悉的流星体束流密切相关的，这些束流我们也叫做流星雨，比如英仙座和狮子座流星雨。而另外90%的微流星体被称作偶发的，因为他们随机地在太阳系中飞速穿行，各自独立，这也造成科学家很难把握他们的行踪。

"It's a little more work to observe sporadics than meteor showers, because they're not nicely organized into events," Althea Moorhead, a meteor scientist at NASA Marshall, told Space.com.

NASA马歇尔飞行中心的流星科学家Althea Moorhead说：“观测偶发流星体比观测流星雨要多付出一点努力，因为偶发流星体不是有规律的出现的”。

(Feinberg said that the JWST team believes the impacts the observatory is detecting have come from sporadics.

Feinberg说，JWST团队相信望远镜受到的撞击来自偶发流星体。

Scientists also know what type of bodies micrometeoroids come from: about 90% from comets and 10% from asteroids, either the rare active asteroids or debris from a collision between space rocks. And a micrometeoroid's origin shapes its impact. "Of course it makes a big difference if your spacecraft gets hit by a solid rock as opposed to kind of a fluffy aggregate of little grains," Campbell-Brown said. "One's like being sandblasted, and the other one's like being shot."

科学家还已经知道了微流星体来源于哪种天体：90%左右来自彗星，10%左右来自小行星，即它可能是直接来自稀有的活动小行星，也可能是小行星之间碰撞产生的碎片。微流星体不同的来源也决定了其撞击会产生的后果。Campbell-Brown说：“你的卫星被一块实心石子撞上还是被一个蓬松石子撞上，后果当然差别很大。前者类似被子弹击中，后者类似喷砂。”

Because micrometeoroids are far too small for any telescope to see, they're tricky to study, so scientists have combined three main approaches.

微流星体实在太微小，以至于难以用天文望远镜观察他们。他们研究起来难度又很大，因此科学家使用了三种方法。

First, scientists can study nearby meteoroids thanks to their interactions with Earth's atmosphere. As each meteoroid travels through the atmosphere, its edges warm and erode, leaving what scientists call an ionization trail, which specially tuned radar systems can detect.

第一种方法，通过研究他们与地球大气的相互作用来研究流星体。当流星体在大气中运动时，它的边缘会被加热、烧蚀，产生所谓的离子尾迹，这种现象可通过特殊设计的雷达系统进行观测。

"The little tiny particles themselves are much too small for the radar to see," Campbell-Brown said of the meteoroids. But the trails they leave are much larger. "All of those electrons in the atmosphere have a scattering cross-section the size of an aircraft carrier, so there we can get a really good signal even off of these tiny, tiny little particles."

Campbell-Brown说：“这些小颗粒本身对雷达来说太小了，很难看到。但是他们产生的尾迹却大很多，大气尾迹中的电子具有的散射截面可以达到一个航空运输机大小，因此我们可以从这些很小很小的颗粒上得到比较好的观测信号。”

And these trails offer scientists a trove of data. The observatory Campbell-Brown uses, Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar in Ontario, catches thousands of meteor trails each day, she said, and that's enough information to calculate each object's orbit. "So we get thousands and thousands of meteor orbits every day, which really helps us to build up a picture of where these small particles are coming from," Campbell-Brown said.

这些尾迹给科学家们提供了丰富的数据。Campbell-Brown使用的位于加拿大安大略省的加拿大流星雷达每天可观测到数千个流星尾迹。她说：“我们每天都可获得成千上万个流星的轨道，这些轨道确实能帮助我们分析这些微小的颗粒来源”。

Second, scientists can consult data from two key missions. NASA lofted three Pegasus spacecraft during the 1960s and '70s; each sported massive wings designed to catch meteoroids and soared to the altitudes Apollo astronauts would reach. Pegasus was followed in the 1980s by the Long Duration Exposure Facility, which the space shuttle program left in orbit for nearly six years and then returned to Earth, letting scientists directly study meteoroid impact scars.

第二种方法，从专门的卫星任务获得数据。NASA在1960到1970年代发射了三个Pegasus卫星：每颗卫星都带有巨大的“翅膀”用来“捕捉”微流星体。卫星进入了阿波罗宇航员将要执行任务的轨道。在Pegasus之后的1980年代，采用航天飞机发射了Long Duration Exposure Facility，它在轨道上运行接近6年后才回到地球，这使得科学家们有机会直接对微流星体留下的“撞击伤疤”进行研究。

With just four objects that never left Earth's orbit, the spacecraft data is limited, but still useful. "The vast majority of our data is looking at meteors, but it's nice to have some other form of detection to help us tease out some of the ambiguities," Moorhead said.

只有4个卫星，并且是没有离开地球轨道的卫星，它们所能提供的数据还是有限的，但也用处很大。Moorhead说到：“我们得到的数据绝大部分是针对流星的，因此其他的观测方法可以帮助我们找出数据中模糊的地方”。

Help from computers

计算机来帮忙

But that's basically all scientists have in the way of observations, so the final technique is modeling.

基本上所有科学家在观测中都会采用模拟来辅助。

Scientists can use computers to simulate the solar system's smallest debris, both its formation and its path; they can smash asteroids to smithereens, create artificial comets and watch them dribble material through the neighborhood, and test how Jupiter's massive gravity might shape meteors' paths.

科学家可以用计算机来模拟太阳系中最小的物体，它的形成和运动的轨迹。科学家可以把小行星撞成碎片，创造人工彗星然后观察他们喷撒到周围的物质，试验木星的巨大引力是否可以改变流星的轨迹。

These days, the models are powerful enough to include what direction particles are coming from. "Our models have advanced to the point where we can tell you which are the riskiest directions to look, whereas the older models were more smeared out, if you will," Cooke said. That's particularly important information for JWST, since head-on impacts are more energetic and so cause more damage.

今年来，微流星体模型已足够强大，可以考虑尘埃颗粒来源方向的影响。Cooke说：“我们的模型已经先进到这种程度，可以告诉你哪个方向是微流星体通量最大的，而早一些的模型更像是“涂抹了的画面”一样”。这对于JWST是非常重要的，因为朝向它的撞击能量更高，引起的损伤更大。

Still, figuring out what's going on around JWST is a tricky business, since both sources of direct observation come from Earth's neighborhood and there's no guarantee the two regions are identical when it comes to micrometeoroids.

然而，找出发生在JWST上的撞击原委是很困难的一件事，因为现有的观测都是在地球周围的，我们没法保证地球附近和JWST所处的区域其微流星体环境是一样的。

"The problem we have is that the only meteors that we observe generally are close to the Earth, because you're going to look at them in the Earth's atmosphere or you have some impact on the satellites," Auriane Egal, a science advisor at Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan in Canada who works on modeling meteor streams, told Space.com. "You can never say, like, 'I'm sure that at L2 this is what's happening,'" she added. "But you're using the Earth and every impact that has occurred on spacecraft in the past to confirm your theoretical models and your numerical models and use that as a basis to predict what's going to occur elsewhere in the solar system."

Auriane Egal是加拿大天文馆（Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan）的科学顾问，从事流星雨的模拟工作，他说：“问题在于我们目前观测到的流星一般都在地球周围，因为你或者是在地球大气中看到它们，或者是通过地球卫星被撞击而发现它们。你不能说‘我肯定日地L2点会这样’。但是你可以使用地球观测数据和地球卫星的撞击数据来确认你的理论模型和你的数值模型是正确的，然后以此来预测太阳系中其他地方正在发生的情况。”

And so far, JWST's experiences suggest that scientists have been on track with their estimations of the environment at L2. Still, observatory personnel are tweaking their approach, limiting the amount of time the telescope's mirror can point forward, when it's vulnerable to the most energetic — and therefore most damaging — impacts.

到目前为止JWST的在轨经历证明科学家们关于L2微流星体环境的估计是对的。然而，望远镜专家也在微调他们的观测策略，限制望远镜的主镜面指向飞行方向的时间，因为当它指向飞行方向时，它更容易受到能量最高、也是最具破坏性的撞击。

No one expects that micrometeoroids will take top billing as scientists consider JWST's legacy years from now. But it's likely not the last telescope we'll send to L2, nor is it likely to be the last observatory with a bare mirror. It's worth knowing what's happening out there.

当科学家考虑JWST的未来时，没人觉得微流星体会是主角。但是，JWST不是最后一个去往L2的望远镜，也不是最后一个裸露镜面的望远镜。因此弄清楚L2点的环境，还是非常值得的。