The International Space Station isn’t going to fall apart because of this one little chip, but it is an impressive crater considering what made it. The European Space Agency estimates that the quarter-inch divot came from an impact with a tiny fleck of space debris.
British astronaut Tim Peake took the photo above inside the ISS’s Cupola, an observatory and workspace for astronauts that juts out into space. The Cupola has extra strong fused-silica and borosilicate-glass windows, but that nick was caused by something miniscule, “possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimetre across,” ESA writes.
Debris is a constant threat to satellites and space agencies have to take extensive precautions to protect their equipment, while also trying to avoid adding more detritus. The agency writes, “An object up to 1 cm in size could disable an instrument or a critical flight system on a satellite. Anything above 1 cm could penetrate the shields of the Station’s crew modules, and anything larger than 10 cm could shatter a satellite or spacecraft into pieces.”
Good thing that glass is specially reinforced.
