ИСТИНА

Space activity of the humanity generated a great amount of orbital debris; i.e. manmade objects and their fragments launched into Space, inactive at nowadays and not serving any useful purpose. Those objects sizing from hundreds of microns up to decimetres, travelling at orbital velocities, remaining in orbits for many years and numbering billions formed a new media named "space debris" and became a serious hazard to space flights. Collision with a debris metallic particle of 1 cm radius is energetically equivalent to a collision with a ton mass car moving at a speed 100 km per hour. Effective mechanical shielding of Space vehicles is an acute problem since the flights in outer Space face the Space debris problem, especially at low Earth orbits and geosynchronous orbits. The main idea of protecting Space vehicles from hypervelocity small (character size of 1 cm order) fragments is to dissipate the impact energy in some way by the shielding layer. Simple increasing of the vehicle shell thickness is not effective as at speeds of the order of kilometers per second, the depth of penetration is big and the total weight becomes unacceptable for a practical usage. The new concept suggested by the Authors states that protecting the spacecraft by a honeycomb of small gas-filled containments could form a much more efficient shield with lower mass. As multi-sheet shielding concept uses thin shield elements to repeatedly shock the impacting projectile to cause its melting and vaporization, so is the new gas-filled containment shield concept still using continuous effect of pressurized gas to cause fragments slowing down, heating, melting, atomization and evaporation. Besides, using many successive layers of gas-filled spherical bumpers makes it possible to increase the area of the zone of impact energy redistribution and dissipation including the side and front walls of bumpers due to the property of gas to transmit pressure in all directions, which provides a considerable advantage to the present concept as compared with multi-layer shields. The gas-filled bumper shields could be reusable, as the rate of gaseous phase leakage effect on depressurization is rather low and the loss of mass is negligible during the characteristic time of impact. The project got a financial support from Russian Science Foundation (Nr 18-11-00225).