About a month after a tiny piece of space debris stranded three astronauts for nine days aboard China\u2019s Tiangong space station, the taikonauts aboard the orbital outpost have begun making some modifications.<\/p>\n
According to state media network CGTN<\/a>, the country\u2019s space travelers Zhang Lu and Wu Fei endured an eight-hour spacewalk earlier this week in order to install a debris protection panels on the space station\u2019s outer hull. While there, they also performed an inspection of Tiangong\u2019s exterior, along with other minor repairs.<\/p>\n The countermeasure installation comes after the China Manned Space Agency pulled off an uncrewed emergency flight<\/a> to Tiangong in under two weeks after the damage was discovered. It was an impressive feat, to say the least. Although the Shenzhou-20 space vehicle<\/a> was meant to bring the previous crew back on November 5, cracks in the craft\u2019s window caused by the space debris led to it being judged unsafe for the return voyage.<\/p>\n Instead, the crew who arrived abord the Shenzhou-20 had to use the Shenzhou-21 craft, leaving the newly-arrived crew without a return vehicle. Thankfully, the emergency flight was a success, delivering the Shenzhou-21 crew a new return vessel<\/a>, the Shenzhou-22, which presumably came along with the debris protection materials.<\/p>\n Orbital debris has become a major issue for space agencies throughout the world, as your average hunk can travel as fast as 15 km per second<\/a>, or over 10 times the speed of a bullet on Earth. Given that there are over 25,000 tracked pieces of space garbage floating about \u2014 and as many as 170 million bits that are too small to track \u2014 this combination could prove deadly for manned space missions.<\/p>\n Stateside, startups like Atomic-6<\/a> are working on materials like \u201cspace armor,\u201d composite-to-resin tiles meant to protect satellites and manned craft alike from the ever-growing threat.<\/p>\n For decades, space agencies have used barriers called Whipple shields<\/a> to protect vehicle hulls from impact. These are incredibly bulky, however, and have a tendency to break into \u201csecondary debris\u201d on impact with space junk, which only kicks the can further down the road.<\/p>\n With any luck, the CMSA\u2019s countermeasures will help the agency stave off any further catastrophe, though the danger is far from over.<\/p>\n