This was a known risk, and now, they get to modify the forward planning risk assessment for strike frequency at L2.<p>I think the design can be considered the sweet spot for how they can try to work around damage like this. I imagine there ARE possible patterns of loss which won't be as easy to mitigate, maybe the closer to the middle of a segment you are, the harder it is to make this a marginal consequence? There will be good engineers modelling this every which way.<p>If they had more smaller segments, they'd have traded final image quality for higher survivability of a single mirror loss. I imagine the size/quality trade off here was really heavily worked through, because once you've made 18 segments, making 100 or 1000 isn't such a big deal, especially if they are smaller. I wonder if people argued for a 256+ segment mirror rig. More mechanical failure risks.<p>It sad it happened at all. I kind of wish they'd had at least SOME round of science imaging before impact, not just during the tuning phase, so they can do before/after comparisons on science-grade collimation. Again, they probably modelled this out, so maybe it doesn't matter.<p>The article is kind-of philosophical about it: Will it "matter" ? we don't know. Lets see. Was it an acceptable risk? Sure, but we won't know future risk for a bit. Lets see.<p>Basically, wait: don't jump to conclusions.