The Whipple shield or Whipple bumper, invented by Fred Whipple, is a type of spaced armor shielding to protect crewed and uncrewed spacecraft from hypervelocity impact / collisions with micrometeoroids and orbital debris whose velocities generally range between 3 and 18 kilometres per second. According to NASA, the Whipple shield is designed to withstand collisions with debris up to 1 cm.

Fred Lawrence Whipple was an American astronomer, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory for more than 70 years. Amongst his achievements were asteroid and comet discoveries, the "dirty snowball" hypothesis of comets, and the invention of the Whipple shield.