June 10th, 2015

An aluminium plate, ripped inwards by a single sand grain-sized fleck of aluminium oxide shot at it during hypervelocity testing.
Man-made space debris and natural meteoroids moving at high speed can damage satellites and constitute a serious hazard to spaceflight, especially human spacecraft.
Typical impact speeds encountered by satellites are 10 km/s for space debris and 20 km/s for meteoroids – some 10–20 times faster than a bullet from a gun.
Measuring approximately 15x15 cm across, the plate displayed outside the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The main hole, seen here, measures 28x12 mm across, with a few smaller adjacent holes.
ESA engineers typically use numerical simulations to study the potential effects of hypervelocity impacts on missions.
In addition, ground-based hypervelocity tests are performed at several test sites in Europe. Light gas guns are available at the Ernst-Mach Institut (Germany), CISAS (Italy), Centre d’Etudes de Gramat (France), The Open University and University of Kent (UK).
Electrostatic accelerators, also used for hypervelocity testing, are used at the Max-Planck Institut für Kernphysik (Germany), The Open University and the TU Munich.