Meteor showers provide spectacular skywatching opportunities for observers on the ground as meteoroids — grains of cosmic dust left by comets — burn up, producing brilliant “shooting stars” as they enter Earth’s atmosphere.
The next big meteor shower to grace our skies is the Perseid meteor shower which is expected to peak around Aug. 11-12.
But when a meteor shower douses Earth, does it pose any threat to satellites, spacecraft or astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS)?
In most cases, absolutely not, said Bill Cooke, head of NASA‘s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“If you are inside the ISS, meteoroids pose zero risk,” Cooke told Space.com.
How the ISS is protected from meteoroids
Astronauts are protected from meteoroids because the ISS is equipped with a “Whipple bumper.” Named after its inventor, Fred Whipple — who developed the “dirty snowball” model that describes the makeup of comets — the shield features sheets of metal with Kevlar between them. The shield doesn’t deflect meteoroids, but it breaks them up, dispersing their energy into the shield.
“The odds of a meteoroid penetrating the space station are vanishingly small — you can think of the space station as the tank of low Earth orbit,” Cooke said. “If you were an astronaut on EVA [extravehicular activity, i.e., a spacewalk] and you went outside the space…
Source www.space.com
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