Whipple shield

The Whipple shield or Whipple bumper, invented by Fred Whipple, is a type of spaced armor shielding to protect crewed and uncrewed spacecraft from hypervelocity impact / collisions with micrometeoroids and orbital debris whose velocities generally range between 3 and 18 kilometres per second (1.9 and 11.2 mi/s). According to NASA, the Whipple shield is designed to withstand collisions with debris up to 1 cm, which helps to mitigate the Kessler syndrome.