A surprising discovery was recently made by a Lithuanian company that sent a mini-satellite into space in April 2022: a six-millimeter hole (pictured above) can be seen in a selfie taken by a camera on board the MP42 satellite.
“As for the cause, we obviously cannot rule out an alien satellite woodpecker, but our most likely guess is a piece of space debris or a micrometeorite,” Kongsberg NanoAvionics, a spin-off of Vilnius University, wrote a week ago. on X (formerly Twitter; see tweet below).
Thanks to a selfie camera on the MP42, the damage to the satellite was documented. If the camera had not photographed the hole, the damage to the solar panel would not have been noticed at all, the company says.
Hole only discovered by chance
As the solar panel telemetry data shows, the impact did not affect the MP42’s power generation, they say. The impact was only noticed thanks to the recording made by the on-board selfie camera in October. Since MP42’s last selfie was taken in April 2023 – a year and a half ago – it is therefore virtually impossible to determine when the impact occurred.
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), there are nearly three million kilograms of man-made objects orbiting within a 2,000 kilometer radius of the Earth, but only 200 kilograms of meteoroid mass reside in this area at any given time.
“Regardless of whether the impact was a micrometeorite or a piece of space debris, the collision underlines the need for responsible space operations in orbit. And it makes us think about the resilience of satellites to such events,” NanoAvionics said in the statement on its website.
Source: Krone
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