The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., is trying to understand how much small debris is orbiting earth as more rockets and satellites begin to crowd into low earth orbit.

As part of this mission, it launched the Lightsheet Anomaly Resolution and Debris Observation (LARADO) technology demonstration satellite in April. The satellite will detect orbital debris that is, at most, a millimeter in size, according to LARADO principal investigator Andrew Nicholas.

While seemingly innocent, these particles travel through space at mind bending speeds, posing a significant danger to astronauts, other satellites and future space missions.

“We’ve got wonderful things happening with industry doing mega constellations and providing wonderful services from that,” said Nicholas. “With that, there’s a risk, there’s more mass on orbit, and there’s more chance for debris and for cascading type effects.”

Estimates suggest there are over 100 million objects in space that are smaller than one millimeter, he said. The NRL satellite will help provide more data on this number, and refine the estimates. Though small, these objects present a significant danger to astronauts, satellites and future space missions given the speed with which they orbit.

Previously, NASA, the European Space Agency and other partners could gather data and samples of these small pieces of debris because they’d return from orbit on the space shuttle, Nicholas said. Now., however, with the Space Shuttle being retired in 2011, there’s no way to get samples, nor gather the data, he added.

“What we’re getting out of this mission is to try to understand that population density of these really small things,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to track them quite yet,” but that may change in the future with a follow-up mission, he added.

“Ideally, we would want to have a mission that could make measurements at several different orbits and kind of work our way up through low earth orbit and get a good profile of what this debris popular population looks like,” Nicholas said. “The nice thing about the sensor technology is it’s scalable.”

Tracking is something of a specialty for Colorado Springs. It is home to businesses like Bluestaq, which built the unified data library meant to catalog various space related data points, and companies like Lockheed Martin, which build and operate the GPS satellite constellation. The Springs is home to U.S. Northern Command, North American Aerospace Defense Command and many space and technology focused businesses.

The state is home to more than 50% of the Space Force’s workforce — guardians who run the GPS satellites, provide missile warning and missile tracking, and enable satellite communications, among other tasks.