Mainstream Headline: OMG this is terrible!
Article: This is expected and happens all of the time and the telescope is fine.
Unfortunately, modern journalism has devolved over the years and they love to use sensationalism, writing sensationalised articles in their headlines to deceive their audience into clickbait. The reality in this case particularly the impacts of meteoroids hitting the JWST is very normal. In fact, these impacts will continue to occur for the duration of Webb's mission in space; such occurrences were expected whilst the mirror was being constructed and tested on Earth.
Even the speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant. The telescope's mirror was designed to resist the dust-sized micrometeoroids; the possibility of micrometeoroid hits was anticipated and contingencies like this were incorporated into the choice of materials, the construction of components and the different modes of operating the telescope so Webb is doing just fine and there's no need to worry, no sensationalism needed.
And considering it cost $10,000,000 to make, it is built to endure!
We will be able to view the magnificent photographs from this mighty machine on the 12th of July. Though, we all might be expecting pics of distant galaxies, but not yet! The telescope will peer directly into Jupiter. The JWST will also take a closer look at Jupiter's moons Io and Ganymede, the latter being the only known moon that has its own magnetosphere.
One of the main uses of the James Webb Space Telescope will be to study the atmospheres of exoplanets and to search for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe.
Here is a simulation of what Webb will capture
The above/left image is a computer-generated image simulated to show close to what we will see in the new space telescope, with the power of the hexagonal mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope. The image at the bottom is an actual photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has over 5,600 individual galaxies within it. And that Hubble photograph is just a tiny patch of the sky so small it is the same size of your thumb at arm's length pointing at the sky.
In the Observable Universe alone there are over two trillion galaxies, that's 2,000,000,000,000,000! just in the Observable Universe! There are most likely more than this outside of the Observable Universe as the Universe is homogeneous, but we don't know for sure as it is not observable. Exciting times lie ahead with the JWST.
Below is Hubble's Deep Field
Another main mission for the web, using Webb's massive mirror and infrared tech, will be able to peer back into the early galaxies. We will be able to observe the universe at the time of the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were forming, around a quarter of a billion years (and maybe as far back as 100 million years) after it began to develop.
Here's two fantastic illustrations to end with.
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