![]() ![]() ![]() will be killed in a hurricane is about one in six million. By comparison, the risk of being hit by lightning is one in 1.4 million and the risk that someone in the U.S. It is estimated to be less than a one in one trillion chance that a particular person will be injured by falling space debris. The overall risk to an individual from reentering debris is extremely small compared to the other hazards we face daily. What is the risk to people on the ground? That is one of the reasons that the shields on the ISS do not protect it from everything that cannot be tracked. The difficulty is that to shield against bigger objects, the shields must be bigger and eventually they become too heavy to launch and must be spaced too far apart. ![]() A Whipple shield is a multi-layered shield designed so that the first layer breaks up the impacting object the second layer breaks those fragments into smaller objects, and so on until the fragments are too small to penetrate the last layer. Most of the ISS shielding protect against particles up to about 3 mm in size. Image Credit: NASAĬan we protect the ISS and other satellites? ![]()
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