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Watch This Bullet Blast Through a Space Shield

The European Space Agency is building a better space shield to protect cubesats from cosmic dust.
Image: European Space Agency

The Earth is quite literally enveloped in a cloud of cosmic flotsam that ranges from naturally occurring particles of space dust to the jettisoned fairings from rocket launches past. Most of these larger pieces of space debris are actively tracked by NASA and other space organizations, but even tiny fragments of rock or metal can destroy a spacecraft when they’re moving at thousands of miles per hour.

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“Larger pieces of debris can at least be tracked so that large spacecraft such as the International Space Station can move out of the way, but pieces smaller than a centimeter are hard to spot using radar,” European Space Agency researcher Benoit Bonvoisin said in a statement.

Engineers case spacecraft in protective shields to protect against this celestial buckshot, but figuring out how to create a lightweight material that can also withstand high velocity impacts is no small task. In order to build a better space shield, the European Space Agency partnered with the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics in Germany to test a new type of shield by shooting bullets at it.

As seen in the above video, a 2.8 millimeter solid aluminum bullet moving at 15,600 miles per hour (nearly the same speed as the International Space Station) is shot at a Whipple shield, which consists at least two walls separated by up to 30 centimeters. Each wall in this shield is made from “fiber metal laminates,” which basically consist of several thing metal layers bonded together. As the bullet passes through the first wall it explodes into fragments, which are easily deflected by the second wall.

Read More: We Need to Clean Up Space Debris to Make Way for the Small Satellite Boom

Whipple shields like the one seen above have been used to protect the astronauts in the ISS for decades, but there’s always room for improvement in terms of the materials used for the shield. According to the ESA, this new fiber metal laminate material is being tested to see how it fares compared to current aluminum shields. The next step is to test the material in orbit with a cubesat.