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$5M grant makes space junk more visible

A satellite high above the Earth.
NASA

Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered what is up there? A University at Buffalo team has federal dollars to find out what is up there, at least in the first few thousand miles.

Working with MIT, Purdue, Penn State and Georgia Tech, UB has a five-year, $5 million research program to determine better ways of spotting what is there. It's the first such grant from Washington, in this case the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, working with the Space Force.

UB SUNY Distinguished Professor John Crassidis said the grant is based on past work and the computer capability to put the data together on what's there.

Outer space is increasingly filled with satellites, no-longer working satellites, launch rockets, debris from launching satellites and some materials of space like meteorites. Many are too small for the network of radar stations, telescopes and even other satellites to spot. That can lead to debris or micro-meteorites damaging satellites or even threatening the International Space Station.

Crassidis said finding what's there is not easy in space, what's called space domain awareness.

"About softball size, about 10 centimeters. Anything bigger than that we can see," said the principal investigator. "That's actually pretty small, if you think about it. The problem is that there are a lot of objects that we can't see, obviously, like a marble-sized. And we really don't know the numbers. That's estimated to be upwards of about 600,000 of those objects. What we track right now is around 30,000 objects."

Crassidis said his lab in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department has plenty of graduate students to work on the process, and the university has an undergraduate program that is now building a research satellite slated to be delivered ready for launch in June.

"It's an education experience," he said. "It's obviously a tremendous honor to win this and it's the first one, so-called Multi-University Research Initiative. They put the "S" in front of it because it's for space. It's the very first one that they did in the space domain awareness area. It's great to win one of these. It's also great that we won the first one in space."

Mike Desmond is one of Western New York’s most experienced reporters, having spent nearly a half-century covering the region for newspapers, television stations and public radio. He has been with WBFO and its predecessor, WNED-AM, since 1988. As a reporter for WBFO, he has covered literally thousands of stories involving education, science, business, the environment and many other issues. Mike has been a long-time theater reviewer for a variety of publications and was formerly a part-time reporter for The New York Times.