Word: meteoroids
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that velocity, says Guenter Riegler, a NASA senior scientist, a meteoroid as small as a dust particle could blast a hole nearly half an inch across in a solar panel or a layer of insulation. Equally threatening is the intense heat of impact, which would instantly vaporize the meteoroid and convert it to an ionized gas, or plasma, that would shock the spacecraft with an electrostatic charge. "If that charge got into some of your data circuitry," Riegler says, "it could wipe out data...