NASA Reveals How Atomic Oxygen Threatens Spacecraft-Why ISS Survives with Protective Coatings

NASA reveals how atomic oxygen threatens spacecraft-why ISS survives with protective coatings

NASA confirmed in a 2025 technical report that atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit degrades spacecraft materials, but the International Space Station survives

Atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit slowly eats spacecraft surfaces, and the ISS survives because engineers learned to coat, test, and replace the materials most vulnerable to it

Roughly 400 kilometres above Earth, the International Space Station is flying through a kind of invisible chemical weather. The station is not moving through empty space. It is moving through the thin upper atmosphere, where sunlight breaks oxygen molecules apart into single oxygen atoms. Those atoms are reactive, fast-moving, and hard on the materials used outside spacecraft. Atomic oxygen does not chew through the ISS like acid through paper. …