Almost seventy years after the launch of humanity’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, Earth is surrounded by millions of space debris that could collide and seriously damage satellites, but most of them are too small to track. Now, a new federally funded project aims to detect and track such dangerous pieces of small space debris for which the technology does not yet exist.

“It’s not about size, it’s about energy,” Piyush Mehta, an associate 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 moves so fast, it can be compared to a truck going 70 miles per hour.” [113 км/год]. You don’t want to get in his way.”

Softball-sized Low Earth Orbit (LEO) objects are currently tracked by the US Air Force’s Space Surveillance Network (SSN) using radar and optical sensors located around the world. While this technology can track the trajectories the objects are in and use this information to predict close encounters and possible collisions, there is currently no way to track very small space debris objects, which have a very high destructive potential given their massive speeds.

For example, at an altitude of 250 miles (400 kilometers) (the average altitude of the International Space Station) objects orbit the Earth at approximately 17,900 miles per hour (28,800 km/h).

The second project is funded by the US government’s IARPA program (short for “Advanced Research Projects in Intelligence”). According to the same statement, technologies and algorithms can be developed that will first detect and characterize small pieces of debris, and then track dangerous objects. To do this, the researchers plan to create and work in a simulated environment that reflects the real system, although details are sparse.

One way to track small pieces of space debris could be to use small-scale technology. Last month Belgian company Arsec began developing a device that uses star trackers on satellites to map debris paths. If successful, such a device could improve our understanding of how small pieces of debris contaminate our local space environment.

Experts say that unless we change our behavior and/or improve our tracking technology, at some point there will be a massive collision between pieces of space debris above the CSO. Thanks to recent investments in projects to detect and track objects in densely populated environments, some solutions to this complex problem may be on the horizon.