REAL LIFE NEWS: SPACE DEBRIS DINGS SPACE STATION WINDOW
by Hazed
One of the astronauts on the International Space Station has tweeted a picture showing a crack in the station’s window, that was caused by space debris.
This is not as serious as it looks from the picture (which you can see at the link below). The ISS’s windows are quadruple-glazed. An inner layer protects against scuffs caused by the inhabitants, then there’s two 25mm-thick pressure glass panels, and a thinner layer on the outside designed to deal with debris, which is the one that got hit. All the layers are made from transparent ceramic composite glass.
The European Space Agency thinks the cause of the crack was a collision with either a fleck of paint from an old satellite, or a tiny metal fragment a few thousandths of a millimetre across. Such tiny objects can be travelling very fast, as is the station, so when they collide there’s a lot of kinetic energy involved, hence the damage.
This incident serves as a reminder that there is a lot of junk in Earth orbit. This space litter is the remains of nearly 60 years of exploration. It’s getting very messy up there!
