[windsurfer]

A man fired multiple bullets into a telescope and put many holes in the primary mirror, but the science capabilities were only minimally affected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_J._Smith_Telescope

This telescope design already has a giant hole in the middle, and the light-collecting capabilities are hardly affected by small holes.

[ianai]

I think it's kind of like how FaceID or TouchID work regardless of orientation of face/fingerprint. Or how locating a radio source from data across multiple detectors would utilize math and any damage would drop out as slightly more noise. Modern cameras often have dead pixels in their detectors but they're just skipped in the output photos.