Scientists and government agencies have been worried about the space junk surrounding Earth for decades. But humanity’s starry ambitions are farther reaching than the space just around Earth. Ever since the 1960s with the launch of the Apollo program and the emergence of the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, people have been leaving trash around the Moon, too.
Today, experts estimate that there are a few dozen pieces of space junk like spent rocket bodies, defunct satellites and mission-related debris orbiting in cislunar space – the space between Earth and the Moon and the area around the Moon. While this isn’t yet a large amount of junk, astronomers have very little information about where these pieces of space debris are, let alone what they are and how they got there.
