Space is a hostile environment. Spacecraft have to be designed to cope with high vacuum, ultra-violet (UV) radiation, protons and electrons trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts, atomic oxygen, thermal cycling and meteoroid and debris impact. A large variety of materials have now been recovered from long term exposure to the space environment. The authors have investigated samples which have spent several years in space on various satellites, including: the NASA satellite 'Long Duration Exposure Facility' the Franco-Russian 'Aragatz' mission experiment on MIR and the Hubble Space Telescope. The samples come mainly from experiments devoted to the study of meteoroids and orbital debris and the damage that these can cause to spacecraft materials. In this paper some interesting impact features have been selected to demonstrate the different types of damage sustained on different materials. A wide variety of materials exposed to space for several years have been scanned using optical and scanning electron microscopes. Analyses of impacts on the samples reveal useful information about the debris and micrometeoroids which produced them. They also reveal information about the various effects of impacts on different materials. Not only simple isotropic targets are considered, such as aluminium, copper and glass, but also complex multilayer structures, such as composites, thermal blankets and solar arrays. The danger of synergy between the effects of the space environment has also been revealed. An impact on a material already damaged by thermal cycling and UV exposure could provoke a mission-critical incident, wheras individually each type of damage would not constitute a risk.


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    Title :

    Material damage in space from microparticle impact


    Additional title:

    Materialzerstörung im Weltraum durch durch Stöße von Mikropartikeln


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Journal of Materials Science ; 32 , 11 ; 3043-3048


    Publication date :

    1997


    Size :

    6 Seiten, 14 Bilder, 10 Quellen




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English





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