Material damage in space from microparticle impact

A large variety of materials have now been recovered from long term exposure to the space environment. The authors have investigated samples which have spent several years in space on various satellites, including: the NASA satellite ‘Long Duration Exposure Facility’, the Franco–Russian ‘Aragatz’ mision experiment on MIR and the Hubble Space Telescope. The samples come mainly from experiments devoted to the study of meteoroids and orbital debris and the damage that these can cause to spacecraft materials. In this paper some interesting impact features have been selected to demonstrate the different types of damage sustained on different materials.