An Efficient and Effective Light Gas Gun Design for Millimeter-Scale Hypervelocity Testing

This paper serves to document a design for a light gas gun that was used for 3 decades at NASA’s
Langley Research Center. By adapting readily-available equipment and supplies, this apparatus was
capable of accelerating projectiles at up to 9 kilometers per second. The lack of a projectile-carrying
sabot sacrifices some adaptability in projectile size, but results in a design that can be cleaned and
cycled with far less labor input. Overall limitation on the projectile impact energies attainable
effectively limit the applications to assessing the relatively thin shields employed for robotic spacecraft
(less useful for those used for manned missions). The original gun has been decommissioned, but it is
believed that this design has application for robotic spacecraft shield testing in the modern world,
allowing cost-effective generation of larger sample sizes than with conventional sabot-based light gas
guns.