Shooting Spacesuits With Cannons | Simulating Micrometeorites
Our Solar System is full of cosmic garbage. Mostly made from dust and gravel that was created over the eons of the Solar System’s existence. Then there’s human-made waste in orbit of Earth.
Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay
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Spaceships, satellites, and even astronauts face many risks in space. And we tried to prepare for all of them. One of the big ones and essentially inescapable ones are micrometeorites. Collisions with them and space waste will happen. That’s why the American space agency NASA test the durability of their technology by shooting at it with a high-speed gas cannon.
The laboratory at the Ballistics Impact Lab at the Glenn Research Center in Brook Park, Ohio has a twelve-meter-long cannon that fires projectiles such as lead balls at a supersonic speed of 915 meters per second (almost Mach 3). This allows them to simulate micrometeorites that fly through the Universe at similar speeds. Lately, they are focusing on testing different materials for spacesuits. If the spacesuit doesn’t withstand such an impact decompression will quickly follow and this can be very deadly for the astronaut.
The previously mentioned twelve-meter-long cannon is the largest that is available in the lab. Apart from it, they are also equipped with a number of various other smaller gas cannons that they also use for simulations and experiments. The research at the laboratory is primarily focused on cosmic and aerial technologies but it can also find applications in many other industries.
The test with simulated micrometeorites is very important to perfect the spacesuit design. Thus, the laboratory isn’t equipped only with cannons but also with an array of high-speed cameras and sensors that allow them to gather a lot of data for later analysis. And they don’t shoot only lead balls but also simulated lunar minerals – usually igneous rocks.
The testing is neverending both at the Ballistics Impact Lab and the Johnson Center in Houston, Texas where the data is being processed. The spacesuit material is the only thing that stands in between our soft and weak human bodies and the inhospitable darkness of space. And if you yourself want to one-day visit space be sure that one day these tests might save your life.
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