Scientists from Moscow State University (MSU) have proposed a new concept to protect spacecraft and satellites from collisions with debris moving at high speed in near-Earth space. socialbites.ca was informed about this by the press service of the scientific institution.
Collisions with high-speed pieces of space debris pose a serious danger to spacecraft. The required thickness of steel protective screens is so great that their weight exceeds all permissible limits for use in orbit.
The idea to protect MSU researchers is to create screens for space debris from energy-consuming relaxation material. They are a honeycomb structure consisting of many containers filled with a gas-liquid mixture.
When hitting such a screen, kinetic energy will accumulate and turn into thermal energy. The effectiveness of this concept was confirmed during computational modelling.
“The project involves computational predictive modeling of the behavior of a honeycomb screen with thin-walled cells filled with liquid. The use of this type of protection makes it possible to increase the high-energy impact area by including the side and front walls of the container due to the properties of the gas to transmit pressure in all directions and convert impact energy into thermal energy and the destruction energy of the honeycomb container. The more energy is absorbed by the cellular protective screen, the less energy will be transferred to the protected object,” says Nikolai Smirnov, Head of the Laboratory of Wave Processes at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, Professor Emeritus of Moscow State University, working of the system He explained his principle to socialbites.ca.
In the future, this development will help reduce the weight of protection for new orbital stations and reduce the costs of delivering structural elements of protective screens to near-Earth space.
Russian scientists before was created Durable transparent protection for satellite solar panels.