Close to seven decades after the launch of humanity’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, Earth is surrounded by millions of pieces of space junk that could collide and cause significant damage to satellites, but most of them are too small to be monitored.
Now a new, federally funded project aims to spot and track such dangerous pieces of tiny space debris, for which no technology exists yet.
“It’s not about the size, it’s about the energy,” Piyush Mehta, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University who is leading the new project, said in a statement. “It may be the size of a grain of salt, but, because it’s traveling so quickly, it might be comparable to a truck moving at 70 miles an hour [113 kph]. You don’t want to be in its path.”
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