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Originally Posted by Sluggo
Will want to see data come from Webb first before I get too excited. Always a slight chance that an unexpected issue could arise, hopefully NASA did not source the gyroscopes from Hubble or Kepler and the thing doesn't decide to do a barrel roll like the space station did this summer (albeit that was a Russian module issue). Would also suck if the Sun decides to fry the thing as we are getting close to the max in the 11 year cycle although the Earth is right in line too and would cause substantial issues here.
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There are things that can wrong of course as there is some uncertainty. The biggest one for me is there is no way of knowing how many small rocks ranging in size from grains of sand to baseballs are flying around in that L2 area. We simply have o information on that and it is possible that as soon as the satellite gets into that area, it gets shredded. All we can do is wait and see what happens. People think space is just an empty vacuum in between celestial objects, but there is a lot of debris out there. In fact, NASA took this into consideration and assumes that it will get hit be objects occasionally. They reinforced the heat shield to account for this, but there is only so much you can do when the weight has to be kept at a minimum. Or that area of space might be fairly empty and there is no danger at all. It is practically impossible to predict.
For the most part though, I don't think there are a lot of unknowns. They learned a lot from the successes and failures of Hubble, and this isn't really different. It is more complicated, but is essential still just sticking a satellite into space. Most variables can be anticipated and planned for.