Here, among the arid desert sands of Las Cruces, Sierra Space wanted to see in real-time how its proprietary space station skin handles direct impacts from micrometeoroids and orbital debris (MMOD).

Images by Cassini showed no evidence of any darkening of the rings by impacting micrometeoroids — space rock particles smaller than a grain of sand — prompting scientists to conclude the rings ...

Images by Cassini showed no evidence of any darkening of the rings by impacting micrometeoroids — space rock particles smaller than a grain of sand — prompting scientists to conclude the rings ...

Through computer modeling, Hyodo and his colleagues simulated collisions between micrometeoroids and the icy particles of the rings. These impacts typically occur at speeds of about 67,100 mph ...

Images by Cassini showed no evidence of any darkening of the rings by impacting micrometeoroids — space rock particles smaller than a grain of sand — prompting scientists to conclude the rings ...

Images by Cassini showed no evidence of any darkening of the rings by impacting micrometeoroids — space rock particles smaller than a grain of sand — prompting scientists to conclude the rings ...

Over time, micrometeoroids — rocks smaller than a grain of sand hurtling through space — would have slammed into the bright icy particles making up Saturn's rings. The level of dirt seen on ...

This should limit the magnitude of future impacts by ensuring that micrometeoroids don’t strike Webb’s mirror head-on. This is because those micrometeoroids have twice the relative velocity as ...

That thin layer of atoms, which begins at the lunar surface and extends 100 kilometers (60 miles) into space, exists mostly because small micrometeoroids strike the surface, vaporizing atoms and ...

During its 13 years orbiting Saturn, Cassini’s onboard dust detector measured the impact rate of interplanetary micrometeoroids. These dust particles are pulled in by Saturn’s gravity and ...