Abstract: The projectile shape effects on hypervelocity impact are qualitatively and quantitatively investigated in terms of the characteristics of debris clouds and the damage of the rear wall for the typical Whipple shield, by using AUTODYN hydrocodes to simulate numerically the Whipple shield impacted by the spherical, conical, cylindrical and disk projectiles, respectively. The comparisons of the numerical simulation results between these projectiles show that the debris clouds characteristics of the buffer impacted by projectiles of 4 different shapes with the same mass and the same impact velocity are obviously different. The extent of the projectile breaking into fragments increases with the decrease of the aspect ratio. The spherical and the cylindrical projectiles give the least and the most damage to the rear wall at 5 km/s, respectively. It indicates that the projectile shapes have remarkable effects on the hypervelocity impact results, and these effects should be considered in the hypervelocity impact risk assessment and the protection design for spacecrafts. When the spherical projectile-based ballistic limit curves are used to evaluate the debris protection capability of shield, an overestimation will be made, which should be paid attention to in practice.