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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean there is a little meteor hanging out somewhere in the module?

At the typical velocities for this kind of impact, probably not. At these speeds, computer analyses ignore the solid properties of the colliding objects, modeling them as liquids, instead. (The shear resistances is just not relevant, and everything liquefies from the heat from the impact. Even that heat loss is negligible in terms of the total energy of the collision.)

Most likely, there would be fragments of the impactor and the hull, mixed together with each other and oxidized with the station air, floating about. I won't risk speculating about the fragment size, other than to say it would be pretty dang small. (I'm leaning toward "powder," but personally wouldn't rule out either "grit" or whatever "finer than powder" is.)

>or whatever "finer than powder"

silt.

if its even smaller its clay.

So the astronauts have breathed the meteor into their lungs? Funky ...

They're breathing far more dead skin. So are you, though.

I would expect much more stuff to be in the air under zero gravity. On earth dust will settle on the ground but I assume in the ISS it will keep floating around.

Yes, but that's organic and pretty normal. Aren't meteors and say moon dust dangerous because its very sharp and jagged?

Once it’s flashed to a plasma and turned into sub-micron dust? Probably not. The danger if there is any would be if the remaining particulates (assuming it wasn’t mostly reduced to heat, light and some basic elements) are friable.

This is mostly a myth:

https://www.livescience.com/32337-is-house-dust-mostly-dead-...

If it were a hole, as in something punching through. These are cracks. Probably nothing passed through, these opened up beside the impact point as material buckled.

What's the possibility a meteor could hit an astronaut? I imagine that wouldn't be good.

Depends on the size of the meteor. It's very likely survivable; micrometeroid protection is a design feature of the suits, which have plenty of layers, and a small hole won't cause rapid decompression. For a through-suit puncture it's going to be a lot like a gunshot wound.

If you're hit by a speck of dust or a grain of sand you're probably good for most impact sites. If you're hit by a marble you're going to be in real trouble (same is true of the ISS itself in this case).

In any case, it's pretty unlikely.

I'd imagine they have some pretty heavy duty air filters that could catch and remove that sort of particulate. Total speculation though...

MMOD impacts tend towards "vaporize" rather than "puncture". That's how (and why) a Whipple shield works.

The Wikipedia article on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield mentions that the ISS has 100 different kinds of shields on various parts of it -- presumably Soyuz doesn't have one thanks to its quite different launch and re-entry needs.

Soyuz wouldn't have much. Good thing it's in the orbital module; there are much more problematic places for a hole.

MMOD protection for visiting vehicles is actually a bit tough; they are on orbit for quite a while but have constraints around shielding. Both the new Boeing and SpaceX vehicles have had problems achieving high enough statistical survivability rates, mostly due to MMOD strikes. (Soyuz probably wouldn't pass those criteria either, but it's not asked to.)

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