With the amount of space debris orbitting the planet, how do satellites and space stations mitigate against impacts?
In: Engineering
The first line of defense is the vast amount of room there is in space. This means that even though the spacecrafts and debris are both moving at very high speeds they are very unlikely to hit each other. In addition we do have radars on the ground which constantly scan for any debris and will alert the operators of the satellites whenever there is a risk of collision. Most satellites have some remaining fuel intended for station keeping so they can alter their course slightly to avoid the space debris. The issue with this technique is that most of the radar stations were built in the cold war to detect incoming missiles and are therefore no longer being maintained as they used to so we are slowly losing the ability to track space debris.
But it is not uncommon for small pieces of debris to hit spacecrafts. So they have to be designed to handle some impacts. It is possible to build some redundancies into some systems so that the spacecraft will work with some damage. For example solar panels can get holes in them and still operate with just a slightly reduced output. Antennas can similarly get damaged and still work good enough. But for more critical components, especially when humans are the critical component, needs to be armored. There is a number of different techniques used from layers of kevlar to whipple shields to armor plates. So hopefully what you get in an impact is only a small crater.
In addition to all these percussion space stations usually do not technically leave the atmosphere. They orbit the Earth in the upper ionosphere where there is still quite a bit of air. This means that any debris that could potentially hit the space station will get slowed down by the air resistance and will fall down to Earth. So it does not stay in that orbit forever like space debris further up. That gives a lot of protection to the space stations.
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