The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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An aluminium plate, ripped inwards by a single sand grain-sized fleck of aluminium oxide shot at it during hypervelocity testing.
Man-made space debris and natural meteoroids moving at high speed can damage satellites and constitute a serious hazard to spaceflight, especially human spacecraft.
Typical impact speeds encountered by satellites are 10 km/s for space debris and 20 km/s for meteoroids – some 10–20 times faster than a bullet from a gun.
Measuring approximately 15x15 cm across, the 1.2 mm-thick plate is displayed outside the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The main hole, seen here, measures 28x12 mm across, with a few smaller adjacent holes.
ESA engineers typically use numerical simulations to study the potential effects of hypervelocity impacts on missions.
In addition, ground-based hypervelocity tests are performed at several test sites in Europe. Light gas guns are available at the Ernst-Mach Institut (Germany), CISAS (Italy), Centre d’Etudes de Gramat (France), The Open University and University of Kent (UK).
Electrostatic accelerators, also used for hypervelocity testing, are used at the Max-Planck Institut für Kernphysik (Germany), The Open University and the TU Munich.