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HYPERVELOCITY IMPACT IN LOW EARTH ORBIT: FINDING SUBTLE IMPACTOR SIGNATURES ON THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE A T Kearsley 1,2,5, J L Colaux 3, D K Ross 4, P J Wozniakiewicz 2,5, L Gerlach 6, P Anz-Meador 4, J-C Liou 7, T Griffin 8, B Reed 8, J Opiela 4, V V Palitsin 3, G W Grime 3, R P Webb 3, C Jeynes 3, J Spratt 2, M J Cole 5, M C Price 5 and M J Burchell 5. 1 Dunholme, Raven Hall Road, Ravenscar, YO13 0NA, UK (kearsleys@runbox.com); 2 Natural History Museum (NHM), Cromwell Road, London, UK. 3 Ion Beam Centre, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. 4 ESCG-Jacobs, NASA-JSC, Houston, TX, USA. 5 School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK. 6 European Space Agency (ESA, retired), Noordwijk, The Netherlands. 7 NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, USA. 8 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. ABSTRACT Introduction Return of large surface area components from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during shuttle orbiter service missions has allowed inspection of large numbers of hyper-velocity impact features from long exposure in low Earth orbit (LEO). Particular attention has been paid to the origin of the impacting particles, whether artificial Orbital Debris (OD) or natural Micrometeoroid (MM). Extensive studies have been made of solar cells (Graham et al., 2001; Kearsley et al 2005, Moussi et al., 2005) and recently, the painted metal surface of the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 WFPC2 radiator shield (Anz-Meador et al., 2013; Colaux et al., 2014; Kearsley et al., 2014a; Ross et al., 2014). Both of these materials from HST have layers of complex chemical composition, into which particle fragments and melt may infiltrate during impact. Experimental light gas gun (LGG) impacts (e.g. Price et al., 2014) have shown that impactor remains may be dispersed and dilute, often as a very thin and patchy coating within an irregular impact-generated pit. In previous studies, the low concentration of particle residue, the rugged to, © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 14th Hypervelocity Impact Symposium 2017. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are cited. The files attached consist of the Published/publisher’s pdf version of the article and the author's conference presentation., NHM Repository