Protecting Mars Sample Return spacecraft from micrometeorites requires high-caliber work

Micrometeorites are a possible hazard for any space mission, together with NASA’s Mars Pattern Return. The tiny rocks can journey as much as 50 miles per second. At these speeds, “even dust might trigger harm to a spacecraft,” stated Bruno Sarli, a NASA engineer at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Sarli leads a workforce designing shields to guard NASA’s Mars Earth Entry System from micrometeorites and space particles. Just lately, he traveled to a NASA lab designed to soundly re-create harmful impacts to check the workforce’s shields and laptop fashions.

Set far-off from residents and surrounded by dunes, the Distant Hypervelocity Check Laboratory at NASA’s White Sands Check Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, has supported each human spaceflight program from the House Shuttle to Artemis. The lab additionally helps testing for the Worldwide House Station, Industrial Crew, and Industrial Resupply packages.

The lab makes use of two-stage gentle gasoline weapons to speed up objects to speeds that simulate micrometeorite and orbital particles impacts on spacecraft shielding. The first stage makes use of gun powder as a propellent the way in which an ordinary gun does. The second stage makes use of extremely compressed hydrogen gas that pushes gasoline right into a smaller tube, rising strain within the gun, like a automobile piston. The gun’s strain will get so excessive that it might stage the constructing if it had been to blow up. “That’s the reason we frolicked within the bunker throughout the check,” stated Sarli.

NASA’s Distant Hypervelocity Check Laboratory is provided with 4 two-stage gentle gasoline weapons; two 0.17-caliber (0.177-inch bore diameter), a 0.50-caliber (0.50-inch bore diameter), and a 1-inch (1.00-inch bore diameter) gun on the facility. The 1-inch vary is 160 ft lengthy, from gunpowder breech to the top of the goal chamber outdoors.

Engineers spent three days making ready for a one-second experiment. They used the lab’s mid-sized high-pressure (50-caliber vary) two-stage gentle gasoline gun that shoots small pellets 16 to 22 ft per second. “At that velocity, you can journey from San Francisco to New York in 5 minutes,” stated Dennis Garcia, the 0.50-caliber check conductor at White Sands.

Whereas the pellet’s velocity is quick, micrometeorites journey six to seven instances sooner in space. Consequently, the workforce depends on laptop fashions to simulate the precise velocities of micrometeorites. The slower price will check their laptop mannequin’s capacity to simulate impacts on their defend designs and permits the workforce to review the fabric response to such vitality.

Mars Pattern Return is a multi-mission marketing campaign designed to retrieve scientifically chosen samples of rock and sediment that the Perseverance rover is accumulating on the floor of Mars. Bringing these samples to Earth would enable scientist to review them utilizing essentially the most advance laboratory instruments-those that can exist within the coming decade and people within the many years to comply with. The marketing campaign is likely one of the most bold endeavors in spaceflight historical past, involving a number of spacecraft, a number of launches, and a number of authorities businesses. Goddard is presently designing and creating the Seize, Containment, and Return System that may ship the Mars pattern tubes again to Earth.