This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

Got a minute?

It's a scenario straight out of Hollywood.

You're up in a spacecraft,

you've got this capsule around you. And a loose bolt a piece of space junk is

zooming your way and it's going really fast it's going to very likely actually pass

through your

atmosphere is rushing out those holes and you want them sealed right away.

That's Timothy Scott, a polymer scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

He and his team have devised a potential solution to this space disaster, a material that patches

itself up less than a second after impact.

Think of an ice cream sandwich.

The central part, the ice cream of our sandwich,

is a liquid resin.

The cookie parts are sheets of thermoplastic.

When a projectile or a piece of space junk punctures the sandwich,

it exposes the liquid part to the ship's oxygen,

which causes it to solidify, patching the hole.

The researchers tested sheets of the cell-healing material at a firing range,

filming the results with high-speed video. And indeed, the material worked fine here on Earth,

but they say the findings will have to be replicated under pressure conditions like those you'd find in space.

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