About a month after a tiny piece of space debris stranded three astronauts for nine days aboard China’s Tiangong space station, the taikonauts aboard the orbital outpost have begun making some modifications.
According to state media network CGTN, the country’s space travelers Zhang Lu and Wu Fei endured an eight-hour spacewalk earlier this week in order to install a debris protection panels on the space station’s outer hull. While there, they also performed an inspection of Tiangong’s exterior, along with other minor repairs.
The countermeasure installation comes after the China Manned Space Agency pulled off an uncrewed emergency flight to Tiangong in under two weeks after the damage was discovered. It was an impressive feat, to say the least. Although the Shenzhou-20 space vehicle was meant to bring the previous crew back on November 5, cracks in the craft’s window caused by the space debris led to it being judged unsafe for the return voyage.
Instead, the crew who arrived abord the Shenzhou-20 had to use the Shenzhou-21 craft, leaving the newly-arrived crew without a return vehicle. Thankfully, the emergency flight was a success, delivering the Shenzhou-21 crew a new return vessel, the Shenzhou-22, which presumably came along with the debris protection materials.
Orbital debris has become a major issue for space agencies throughout the world, as your average hunk can travel as fast as 15 km per second, or over 10 times the speed of a bullet on Earth. Given that there are over 25,000 tracked pieces of space garbage floating about — and as many as 170 million bits that are too small to track — this combination could prove deadly for manned space missions.
Stateside, startups like Atomic-6 are working on materials like “space armor,” composite-to-resin tiles meant to protect satellites and manned craft alike from the ever-growing threat.
For decades, space agencies have used barriers called Whipple shields to protect vehicle hulls from impact. These are incredibly bulky, however, and have a tendency to break into “secondary debris” on impact with space junk, which only kicks the can further down the road.
With any luck, the CMSA’s countermeasures will help the agency stave off any further catastrophe, though the danger is far from over.
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