NASA Conducts 'Dangerous' Test of a Vacuum Gun to Study Space Rock Collisions - Gizmodo

NASA is up to thing successful Las Cruces, New Mexico. In this distant location, the bureau is studying however antithetic spacecraft designs volition interact with super-tiny rocks whipping done space.

As NASA gears up for much missions disconnected our planet, there’s a batch that tin spell wrong. From rocket failures to leaky airlocks, you mightiness beryllium amazed to perceive that an adjacent oregon adjacent greater menace are bits of tiny abstraction stone that the untrained oculus mightiness categorize arsenic thing much than dust.

But to NASA, these rocks are a immense root of potential destruction for spacecraft traveling done the void, similar the aboriginal Mars Sample Return Mission. These specks of particulate are known to scientists arsenic micrometeoroids, and successful a distant installation successful New Mexico, NASA is investigating caller ways to support spacecraft carrying Martian aboveground samples.

“NASA White Sands is simply a distant trial installation that the bureau uses for immoderate of the much unsafe investigating that is needed to enactment the NASA missions,” said Marcus Sandy, a manager astatine the White Sands Test Facility successful New Mexico, in a video.

The Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory is located wrong White Sands and features a 225-foot-long (69-meter) gun. The weapon is powered with pressurized hydrogen state and is capable to sprout tiny pellets done a vacuum astatine speeds up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) per second—which could get you from New York to San Francisco successful astir 5 minutes. According to NASA, engineers spent 3 days mounting up a one-second agelong experiment, which aims to simulate what would hap if NASA spacecraft collided with a micrometeroid during the trek to oregon from Mars.

“The extremity present is to spot however good those materials withstand those impacts to marque definite that we don’t suffer containment of our sample,” said Russ Stein, a NASA merchandise plan pb specializer for the Mars Sample Return mission.

While the pellets that look from the weapon are moving astatine incredibly accelerated speeds, the micrometeroids that capsicum abstraction are moving astir six times faster—around 50 miles (80 kilometers) per second. Figuring retired which designs and materials are champion for protecting precious Earth-bound Mars samples is important for our quality to study—and perchance adjacent travel—to the Red Planet.

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