NASA fires micro-bullets at the meteoroid shield of the Mars sample-return spacecraft

NASA engineers are firing tiny bullets at the anti-meteoroid shield material that will shield a Mars sample return orbiter during its return to Earth.

An aircraft traveling at the same speed as the bullets during the tests, which are performed at NASA’s distant White Sands Test Facility near Las Cruces, New Mexico, would go from New York to San Francisco in less than five minutes, according to a statement from test engineer Dennis Garcia (opens in new tab).

The engineers must use computer models to replicate the actual velocities, which can exceed 50 miles per second, because these speeds are still slower than meteoroids and space debris bits that circle in space (80 kilometers per second). Bruno Sarli, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is in charge of the tests, said in the statement that at such speeds, “even dust might cause damage to a spacecraft.”

Since the time of the space shuttle, NASA has used the Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory, allowing engineers to create materials that protect the International Space Station, commercial crew vehicles, and space cargo freighters against impacts with space debris and rock fragments.

The gun that shoots the tiny, space-like bullets towards the shield material comprises two phases, the first of which launches a projectile using regular gunpowder. The projectile receives an additional boost from the second stage, which forces highly compressed hydrogen gas into a smaller tube akin to an automobile piston. According to the researchers’ statement, if the gun were to explode because of its extremely high pressure, the building would be completely destroyed.

The engineers discovered that the shield offers stronger defense when it is constructed of numerous thin layers as opposed to depending on one big block of metal to deflect the projectiles, Sarli said.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is now gathering significant samples of Martian rocks on the planet’s surface. These samples will be returned to Earth by the Mars Sample Return Orbiter, which NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will jointly develop.

Scientists will be able to handle newly extracted rocks from another planet in their hands for the first time thanks to the breakthrough operation. Sometimes rocks from Mars will fall to Earth, but these rocks have already spent millions or billions of years in space, where they have been exposed to radiation and extreme conditions.

It is challenging to look for signs of life from the Red Planet in Mars meteorites since they are also tainted by Earth life when they smash onto our planet.