Experimental study on in-situ observation technology and protection performance verification of space debris high-speed impact

The increasing frequency of human space activities has brought about a sharp increase in the number of space debris, and it is inevitable that spacecraft will be impacted by space debris at high speed. Therefore, how to realize the in-situ observation technology of single space debris high-speed impact is the premise of the impact scene reappearance and the further design and verification of space protection. In this paper, a space debris acceleration device with controllable speed and size is realized by using a reusable dome-shaped structure, gas flow regulator and switch control module. Moreover, stroboscopic image segmentation technology is used to achieve high frame frequency imaging, which is achieved by optimizing the light-emitting diode light source channel to provide high frequency light source, so that the camera can accommodate more motion trajectory points in each image. It has been proved that in-situ observation technology can accelerate a single space debris particle with a diameter of 0.5 um to almost 300 m/s, and can realize more than one million frames per second and the spatial resolution of tens of millions of pixels. The minimum observable target size is less than ten microns, and the maximum observable speed is in the kilometer level. Finally, in-situ observation technology of space debris high-speed impact is used to study the space protection performance of bionic shell materials. It is verified that the impact protection performance of this material against space debris with a particle size of 100 um is between 235.75 m/s and 265.42 m/s. This study provides a new method for the microscopic dynamic mechanical characterization and protection performance testing of materials, and further provides a feasible test platform for the study of various high-speed impact scenarios of space debris, which is conducive to the design of space protection.