Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2018
The returned solar cells from the European Retrievable Carrier (EURECA) satellite and one Hubble Space Telescope Solar Array (HST-SA) acted as collector surfaces for microparticles in the vicinity of the Earth. Because only limited information on cratering formulae for solar cells was available from the literature, hypervelocity impact experiments on such samples were performed at the plasma drag accelerator facility of the Fachgebiet Raumfahrttechnik (LRT), TU München. The results from these experiments were combined with data from experiments performed during the Apollo program into a new scaling law relating particle parameters and impact crater dimensions on solar cell targets.