NASA recently conducted an important vacuum gun test at their Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory within the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico for space rock collision research. The data gathered will be used to design shields that will eventually protect future spacecraft as well as astronauts from micrometeorites and space debris.
This 226-foot (69-meter) gun is powered by pressurized hydrogen gas and shoots small pellets through a vacuum at speeds of up to 6.7 meters per second. However, it will take further tests to determine what kind of damage micrometeoroids may cause to spacecraft, as they move 6-times faster than the small pellets. In related news, this vacuum was designed to sort LEGO bricks.
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The goal here is to see how well those materials withstand those impacts to make sure that we don’t lose containment of our sample,” said Russ Stein, NASA product design lead specialist for the Mars Sample Return mission.
