NASA is as much as one thing in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In this distant location, the company is finding out how totally different spacecraft designs will work together with super-tiny rocks whipping via area.

As NASA gears up for extra missions off our planet, there’s loads that may go fallacious. From rocket failures to leaky airlocks, you is likely to be stunned to listen to that an equal and even larger risk are bits of tiny area rock that the untrained eye would possibly categorize as nothing greater than mud.

But to NASA, these rocks are an enormous supply of potential destruction for spacecraft touring via the void, like the longer term Mars Sample Return Mission. These specks of mud are identified to scientists as micrometeoroids, and in a distant facility in New Mexico, NASA is testing new methods to guard spacecraft carrying Martian floor samples.

“NASA White Sands is a remote test facility that the agency uses for some of the more dangerous testing that is needed to support the NASA missions,” mentioned Marcus Sandy, a supervisor on the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, in a video.

The Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory is positioned inside White Sands and incorporates a 225-foot-long (69-meter) gun. The gun is powered with pressurized hydrogen fuel and is ready to shoot small pellets via a vacuum at speeds as much as 22 toes (6.7 meters) per second—which might get you from New York to San Francisco in about 5 minutes. According to NASA, engineers spent three days organising a one-second lengthy experiment, which goals to simulate what would occur if NASA spacecraft collided with a micrometeroid in the course of the trek to or from Mars.

“The goal here is to see how well those materials withstand those impacts to make sure that we don’t lose containment of our sample,” mentioned Russ Stein, a NASA product design lead specialist for the Mars Sample Return mission.

While the pellets that emerge from the gun are transferring at extremely quick speeds, the micrometeroids that pepper area are transferring about six occasions quicker—round 50 miles (80 kilometers) per second. Figuring out which designs and supplies are greatest for safeguarding treasured Earth-bound Mars samples is essential for our skill to check—and presumably even journey—to the Red Planet.

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