Every six weeks, a maneuver is planned for the James Webb Space Telescope to ensure it stays in its orbit a million miles away. It's carried out by a group of skilled engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Watch as the team prepares the observatory! #NASAWebb
@spacetelescope @AstroMigration
Is there a simple way to express the particular gravity of that Lagrange point? Such as a 100 kg object ‘weighing’ 1 kg, the necessary escape velocity, or the size of its gravity field?
@Chancerubbage @spacetelescope @AstroMigration I’m no expert but I think there is no “weight” there - similarly to zero g in space station- you’re basically in free fall around the Sun. As far as escape velocity goes- Lagrange point is like a top of the hill- if you put a ball there it can stay there, but any perturbation and it wil roll down the mountain. This is why the maneuvers are needed- there are many tiny perturbations from planets.
@ProfT @AstroMigration
It gets more complex when you try to explain the relative stability around each lagrange point and thinking of the lissajous orbits (which can seem quite large in expanded scale diagrams) surrounding what gravity wells or hills they might represent, but I think the correction velocities for stabilizing position are in single magnitude meters per second or less. I’m avoiding weight and mass directly by thinking velocity instead (which would account for such forces if so)