Telescope will track space junk

Nature : A piece of space debris as small as one centimeter long can cause serious damage to vital weather, communication, or missile-warning satellites, and the amount of debris orbiting Earth is increasing. The Space Surveillance Telescope , a ground-based telescope developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), took its first images in February; after it passes an evaluation, it will be added to the US Space Surveillance Network.The telescope’s 3.5-meter aperture and three-mirror system make it more powerful and faster than other ground-based telescopes in the network; it can collect data on dimmer objects more quickly and can scan the sky several times in one night. It will focus on the region about 35 000 km from Earth, where objects in geosynchronous orbit reside. The telescope will not be available for use in scientific experiments, but a subset of the data may be made available on a website operated by US Strategic Command, and researchers may be able to get further data on request.