The Mars sample returner's anti-meteorite shield was shot at. We assure you that it was out of love.
The baby bullets were designed to mimic the effects of space debris. The tiny bits and pieces of space rock and off-world garbage can travel at 50 miles per second and do some serious damage.
The return of samples from Mars is one of NASA's most anticipated projects to date, so the agency is making sure that the craft makes it back in one piece.
The tests were done at NASA's Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory. Getting these tiny bullets to go as fast as possible is pretty dangerous.
To accelerate an object to the speed of a micrometeorite requires some serious pressure, which is why the researchers behind the project used a two-stage light gas gun.
Traditional gunpowder is used in the first stage. A projectile is pushed into the tube with compressed hydrogen gas.
The gun's pressure is so high that it could have leveled the building if something went wrong.
Bruno Sarti, leader of the team developing the anti-meteorite shields, said in a statement that they hung out in the Bunker during the test.
The researchers were able to get five miles per second with their tiny bullets.
You could travel from San Francisco to New York in five minutes.
It's not too shabby. The shields work best when made using multiple thin layers of material, as opposed to one thick chunk of metal, according to Sarti.
Here's to NASA's Mars samples returning to Earth safely.
NASA fired micro-bullets at the Mars sample return.
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