We turn now to the skies where it's not just the moon orbiting the Earth.

Laura Barone Lopez reports on the growing problem of human-made debris in space.

Mankind's trash litters our planet from local parks to the depths of the ocean.

But it's not just on Earth.

Debris from everything we've launched into space since the 1950s is clogging Earth's

orbit. That space junk is threatening our technology down here and up there.

For more on what's at stake and how we can manage space junk going forward,

we turn to Marcus Holzinger, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado

Boulder.

Professor Holzinger, thank you so much for joining.

When we say space junk or space debris, what exactly are we talking about and how much is in Earth's orbit?

Great question.

So when we're talking about space debris, we're talking about mostly anthropogenic or human-made

pieces of debris.

So these are defunct satellites, rocket bodies

that have been expended and left up in orbit,

as well as parts of spacecraft or parts of rocket bodies

that have been up there now for in excess of 50 years and even all the way up to the current time.

There are about 40,000 objects that we're tracking right now on orbit,

but there are a lot of objects that are much too small for us to actually track.

And some estimates put that number between a half a million and a million objects up there,

some almost the size of a softball, and of course others getting down to the size of

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