Mar 5, 2021
Cold welding
The process of joining two pieces of metal together without fusion or heating the parts. Two similar surfaces of metal will strongly adhere when they are brought into contact under vacuum. The reason this happens is because the atoms are all of the same kind and under vacuum they simply can't tell that they belong to two different parts. So, they become one. On the ground this is unusual to happen, because the surfaces of metal are re-oxidised after each opening. In space however the oxide layers are broken irreversibly often due to high impact resulting in them wearing down.