This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Aside from all the satellites and the space station orbiting the Earth,

there's a lot of trash circling the planet too.

21,000 baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA.

But that number is dwarfed by the number of small particles.

There's hundreds of millions of those.

And those smaller particles tend to be going fast.

So you think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach,

and that would be on the large side of what we're worried about.

But they're going 60 kilometers per second.

Seagrid Close, an applied physicist

and astronomical engineer at Stanford University.

Close says that whereas mechanical damage, like punctures, is the worry with the bigger chunks,

the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites by causing

electrical damage.

We also think that this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies

we see on orbit that right now are basically First, the dust slams into a spacecraft, incredibly fast.

It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship and itself,

which generates a cloud of ions and electrons

traveling at different speeds.

And then? It's like a spring action so the electrons

...