Hello Everyone,
I am an enthusiast of the US space program and I
finally got around to reading Gordon Cooper's book Leap of Faith. Cooper
was the pilot of Faith 7, the last Mercury flight and the command pilot of
Gemini 5. On pages 125-126, he talks about being hit by "meteorites" on
his Gemini flight. I think his description is interesting (overlookling
innaccurate terminology). Does anyone else know of any more reports by
astronauts or cosmonauts of their spacecraft being hit by meteoroids while
in flight.
Here is the text:
We were told by astronomers to expect front-row
seats for a regular meteorite shower that occurs in the latter part of every
August. It would be the frist one to be observed by man from space.
The first night of the shower was a sight to behold - thousands of meteorites
passing under our spacecraft as they entered the Earth's atmosphere and burned
up like falling stars.
We knew there was a chance that a meteorite might
strike our spacecraft but there was nothing we could do to prevent it and
only hoped that if it happend it would be a small one. We carried a patch
kit with rubber plugs to repair any tiny puncture holes (tiny was the
operative word) to try to keep from losing our cabin pressure. But we were
not prepared for what it sounded like when one actually hit.
A hard metallic BANG!
Pete and I both jumped.
It sounded like a major-league fastball hurled
against the side of our pacecraft, but we knew it was no bigger than a grain of
sand. If the meteorite had been anywhere near the size of a baseball, it
would have gone right through the side of the spacecraft - ending, in a
nanosecond, oor mission and our lives.
Over the course of the next couple of days, we were
struck four or five times. When the spacecraft was dismantled upon it's
return to the Cape - every returning spacecraft was taken apart piece by piece
as part of a total engineering report to assess how it handled the stresses of
flight - impresions were found on the outside wall, as if someone had driven
home an ice pick with a hammer. The meteorites had actually reshaped the
outer titanium wall of the spacecraft, pushnig in the toughest metal known to
man as much as a quarter -inch. (Titanium takes more heat with less damage
than any metal on Earth.) It seemed unbelievable that such a mall
particle had so much energy and caused so much sound, but these cosmic fastballs
were a bit faster than any Hall of Fame pitcher's - a speed gun would
have clocked them in the range of thirty thousand miles
per hour.
-Walter
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