Atomic-6 has announced that its proprietary Space Armor technology has been deployed into space for the first time. Installed on a Portal Space Systems’ Starburst-1 spacecraft, the craft was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 during its Bandwagon-5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Atomic-6’s Space Armor is a new lightweight composite armor for satellites designed to help them survive impacts from space debris. Specifically, it is designed to absorb impacts from tiny impactors without creating more debris of its own.

You can liken it to a kind of bulletproof vest for spacecraft. And the need for this kind of protection is only growing.

Currently, the space around our planet is full of junk. Not just dead satellites and discarded rocket stages, but millions of tiny fragments travelling at enormous relative velocities.

Even a tiny fragment can cause catastrophic damage when it hits a satellite at these kinds of velocities. Consider a 3 mm diameter aluminum sphere travelling at 7 km/s (15,659 mph/25,200 kph).

If the debris only weighed about 38 milligrams, it could deliver something like 0.93 kilojoules of kinetic energy on impact. That’s roughly comparable to the muzzle energy of some powerful handgun rounds, although the physics of a hypervelocity impact are very different.

And, just like a bullet, the energy is concentrated into a relatively small impact area. Such small pieces of junk are also impossible to track and therefore avoid.

One solution is to simply clad your spacecraft in armor to take the hit. Various solutions exist today, but one of the most common is something called a Whipple Shield.

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