Hypervelocity impacts and damage laws

Space debris are nowadays a recognized threat for any space mission. Hypervelocity impacts of space objects can degrade, or terminate prematurely, costly missions. It is, therefore, necessary to improve the survivability of spacecraft. The first step toward this goal is to characterize the behaviour of different materials and configurations under hypervelocity impacts. The purpose of this paper is to present experimental results covering a fairly wide range of materials. Aluminium, carbon fibre reinforced plastics, carbon-carbon, and various type of thermal insulation are considered. The behaviour of sandwich panels with carbon fibre reinforced facings and aluminium honeycomb cores is also investigated. Considerations are given to hypervelocity impacts on gas filled pressure vessels. On the basis of the available data, damage laws are proposed with remarks about their range of applicability. (C) 1997 COSPAR.