So what is it your office does?
Our primary charter is to characterize the near-earth environment – monitoring debris orbiting the Earth.
How do you do that? Can you actually tell where all the debris is?
For things that are larger than 10 centimeters in diameter, the DoD operates the US Space Surveillance Network. They monitor each of them on a day-to-day basis with ground-based radars optical sensors.
For an object smaller than 10 centimeters, it's very hard for a ground-based sensor to keep track of it on a regular basis. With ground-based radars [the Orbital Debris office] can detect objects a couple millimeters in diameter. We can't track them, but we can create statistics, and find how many objects are at various altitudes.
Where does it come from? How much is natural and how much is man-made?
The primary source has been the explosions of spacecraft rocket bodies, and ...
