In 2020, scientists from the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus will ship a shoe-box-sized satellite into Earth’s orbit to monitor enormous gaseous planets whose evaporating atmospheres trail along like comet tails. Once it’s deployed by NASA, let’s hope nothing smashes into it – or that it doesn’t smash into something else.

Space – or at least the narrow band of it that Earthlings depend on to boost communications, navigation, weather forecasting, national security and scientific discovery – is getting crowded. According to a Wall Street Journal report from earlier this year, there’s a veritable traffic jam up there, and advances in miniaturization like the devices used in CU’s planned study are quickly adding to the congestion.

Already, the Air Force tracks 23,000 objects spinning round the globe at unbelievable speeds – some as small as a baseball, others as large as the International Space Station. A lot of those objects are old rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft. There’s also just a lot of wreckage and debris, in part from past collisions. But hundreds of the objects are satellites we depend on. The Satellite Industry Association pegs annual revenue from their services at $127 billion.

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