This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

My area of operations is 73 trillion cubic miles.

General John Heighton, he leads the U.S. Air Force Space Command.

He's counting all the space between the Earth's surface and geosynchronous orbit,

about 22,200 miles up at the equator. in this discussion was the task of keeping the busy space above our planet free of dangerous

and costly collisions. You have to know exactly what is going on, exactly when it's

going on, you have to be able to predict potential hazardous collisions and you

have to be able to predict threats and you have to do that real time.

So one of the reasons that we're building capabilities like improved ground-based telescopes.

We're building space-based, space surveillance systems.

Then we have geosinguarness

program satellites that will move around the geosirionist belt giving us exquisite

understanding of exactly what is in the geosirionist belt which is the most

expensive real estate. Then the other thing the United States has decided to do is

that we're going to take all that information and we're going to

bring it all together and we're going to process it. We're going to do it with our

allies, partner with that capability, and then if we see any collision we're

going to tell whoever that owner-operator is, whether it's us, the commercial

sector, Inmar, sat, Intel, sat, or even if it's a Chinese or Russian satellite, we're going to

tell them. And one of the interesting things

that's happened in the last few months is we used to have to tell the Chinese through the State

Department where we would see a potential collision involving the Chinese satellite, we'd be concerned and we'd provide the information,

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