When you look up at the sky on a clear night, you might be able to see stars, and a planet if you’re lucky. But what you don’t see is all the space junk that’s up there floating around and orbiting earth.Most of it is useless bits and pieces of things like nonfunctioning space rockets, abandoned launch crafts and old satellites that no one cares about anymore. However, this space trash is traveling over 17,000 miles per hour, plenty fast enough to do serious damage to working satellites and the International Space Station. NASA and the Department of Defense are keeping an eye on the debris, but now MIT researchers are helping the tracking efforts with a cool laser.

Originally released by Inside Science, 2017. Streaming video file encoded with permission for digital streaming by Infobase on December 08, 2017.