NARRATOR: They're watching you.
More than 6,000 satellites circle the Earth.
Every day, they uncover new,
mysterious phenomena that defy explanation.
The nuke graveyard.
They've all been dismantled and just left outside to rot.
NARRATOR: The underwater ghost town.
This place really is a mystery.
I mean, a town literally emerged from a lake.
NARRATOR: And China's mystery mega project.
The scale of this is mind-boggling.
NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.
What on Earth are they?
[theme music playing]
January 2022.
A satellite passing over Arizona scans
100,000 square miles of barren desert
and captures this far below.
This is an amazing image -- you're seeing literally
miles of aircraft lined up
in precision on a flat desert floor.
They almost look like toys lined up, ready to take off.
NARRATOR: Around 4,000 rusting military aircraft
are arranged across an area
equivalent to nearly 2,000 football fields.
This place has got some of the coolest aircraft in history.
We've got F-4 Phantoms, F-16s, F-15s, and we've
even got test planes for the space programs.
This place has it all.
NARRATOR: Known locally as the Boneyard,
this is the largest aircraft storage facility on Earth,
yet among the lines of jets and helicopters
is something that doesn't make sense.
Looking closer, you see one very odd thing that sticks out.
It's a very un-aircraft-shaped aircraft.
In fact, it looks more like the hull of a boat.
NARRATOR: Guy Walters studies the mystery hull in more detail.
I think that these are the remains of an entirely
different type of flying machine,
and I think they're the remains of a blimp.
You know, this is the hull
where passengers and pilots are transported.
NARRATOR: Air Force records confirm that the satellite has
uncovered the remnants of a 400-foot-long
ZPG-3W airship.
This aircraft has a special place in history
as one of the largest blimps ever built.
It was involved in the Cold War, and it
was indispensable to protecting America's interests
during that war.
The giant airship's story begins in the early 1950s.
Fears are growing in Washington that
the Soviet Union has developed a long-range nuclear bomber.
When U.S. military attaches report what they witnessed at
a Soviet air show,
those fears turn to panic.
MORGAN: What they saw terrified them --
30 long-range bombers capable of
carrying missiles over to the United States.
WALTERS: That is getting the U.S. government really scared,
because if you've got one air base
like that in Russia, with as many
as 30 of these bombers, then they're thinking there are gonna
be hundreds of these bombers across the rest of the nation.
NARRATOR: Intelligence analysts calculate that Moscow will soon
possess around 600 long-range nuclear bombers,
each capable of striking targets deep within the U.S.
So there is a perception of something
called the bomber gap,
the fear that America is just not going to be able
to withstand a long-range bombing campaign from
the Soviet Union.
WALTERS: You have American politicians now
saying we don't have anything like
the number of bombers that the Soviets have.
These bombers they've got can wipe us out.
NARRATOR: In response,
by 1960, the U.S. military deploys a line of
ZPG blimps in the Atlantic
to scan for incoming Soviet bombers.
CAVELL: These blimps can hold the air for days on end.
They give us far better early warning
system than any kind of aircraft possibly could.
NARRATOR: During the airships'
two-year-long deployment, the U.S. attempts to close
the bomber gap by constructing hundreds of long-range B-52s.
WALTERS: The B-52 is a living legend.
It's sometimes called the Stratofortress,
and that's kind of what it was.
It was a flying fortress.
NARRATOR: The massive rollout of the B-52
costs an estimated $63 billion.
But subsequent reconnaissance images reveal
the entire program is rooted in one
of the worst mistakes in intelligence history.
When we saw those bombers in Russia
years earlier, we were actually looking at
the entire Soviet fleet of long-range bombers.
So when the Americans go on to produce 750-odd B-52s,
that's huge, huge overkill.
It's a classic example of Cold War paranoia.
NARRATOR: Despite its bizarre origins, the B-52
goes on to become one of the most
successful aircraft in history and is still in use today.
This raises another mystery about the site seen from space.
If you look at the Boneyard,
it's chock-a-block with the remains of B-52s,
and they've all been dismantled and just left outside to rot.
There are a lot of these B-52s
sitting there at the Boneyard.
I mean, what is going on here?
NARRATOR: Around 360 dismantled
nuclear bombers litter the facility.
Declassified documents reveal they are the legacy
of a defining moment in U.S.-Soviet relations.
The reason why we've got so many B-52s
is because of a treaty called START 1.
ORWOLL: START 1 was the first of
the treaties that we did with the Soviet Union
that was designed to limit the amount
of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon delivery vehicles.
NARRATOR: As part of the 1991 treaty,
the U.S. agrees to limit its fleet of B-52s to 71 bombers.
Over the following years,
the government tasks the Boneyard with decommissioning
hundreds of the aircraft,
creating the carnage visible in the image.
JANULIS: By dismantling them in the Boneyard, the Russians could
send their satellites over and see that
they were still dismantled,
therefore reassuring them that we were reducing our ability to
project lethal force to Russia.
NARRATOR: Many of the B-52s' parts
are recycled for use in other planes.
Today, they and the thousands of other aircraft here
are symbols of America's
century-long dominance of the skies, visible from space.
ORWOLL: This site may look like a graveyard of aircraft,
but it's actually preserving the legacy of these amazing
airplanes and all
the accomplishments that we've made.
NARRATOR: Coming up, a mystery rises from the depths.
It's really amazing to think how many chapters of
U.S. history played out in this one small town.
NARRATOR: And the Sponge City.
It's an ingenious solution to a deadly problem.
NARRATOR: September 2021,
drones flying high above the western U.S. state of
Utah document
falling water levels after one of the hottest summers
in state history.
The American West has been engulfed in
a drought that has lasted for over 20 years.
We're starting to use the term "megadrought."
NARRATOR: As a camera passes over a receding body of water
25 miles east of Salt Lake City,
it captures a mystery emerging from the depths.
KOUROUNIS: It's really remarkable.
There are what appear to be some old buildings in ruins.
There are these huge squares of rubble, which are
the only remnants of what must have been people's homes
and businesses.
NARRATOR: The aerial images have uncovered the remains
of a drowned settlement lost to history.
MORGAN: This place really is a mystery.
I mean, a town literally emerged from a lake.
Why was it submerged?
Where did the people who lived here go?
NARRATOR: The first colonial settlements
rise out of Utah's deserts as
early as the 16th century,
when Spanish Conquistadors plunder the state's mountains
for gold.
Historical records reveal these structures also belonged
to settlers in search of riches,
but of a spiritual kind.
HUNT: It was a different group of people
who are migrating west because of religious persecution.
It was the Mormons who built this town.
NARRATOR: Joseph Smith establishes the Mormon Church
in Missouri in 1831,
claiming to have received instructions from God,
but his beliefs soon incur
the wrath of other religious leaders.
[indistinct shouting]
HUNT: The Mormons' polygamy was a sin
in the eyes of other conservative Christians
in the Midwest, who drove them out.
NARRATOR: After moving to Illinois,
Smith is murdered by an angry mob.
[gunshot blasts]
To escape further bloodshed,
in 1846, his 3,000 followers, inspired by the Biblical story
of Jews who roamed the desert in search of
their promised land move west.
This would have been a journey through basically
every hazard the Western Frontier can throw at you.
You had wagons full of people
who were dying, literally, along the way.
This really was a very arduous journey out west.
NARRATOR: After a 1,000-mile trek,
the Mormons reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake.
There, they establish more than 350 communities
and clear vast areas of land for agriculture.
One of these new settlements that was established
was Crandall,
which is actually what we're looking at
in this overhead image.
HUNT: They said, "Let's build ourselves a paradise on Earth.
"Nobody will persecute us, because there's nobody
else around."
NARRATOR: But the Mormons' paradise is far from empty.
For more than 1,000 years,
the state has been the home and hunting grounds of
the Ute people,
a nomadic tribe who give Utah its name.
The Ute were rightly upset that
their way of life was changing
and that they were losing their
tribe lands to these Mormon settlers.
KERLEY: There was less supply of the wild animals that
the Utes would hunt, and a number of Utes died
from smallpox.
They blamed the Mormons for bringing the disease,
so now we have conflict between the Utes and the Mormons.
NARRATOR: In 1865, the Ute chief,
Antonga Black Hawk, forms an alliance
with Navajo and Paiute tribes to wage war against
the Mormons.
The town of Crandall became a focal point for the war path,
and the residents were terrified.
JANULIS: They couldn't call on other settlements
for aid quickly.
So for their own self-defense and out of fear,
they built a fort to protect themselves.
After renaming their settlement Rock Fort,
the Mormons negotiate a truce with Black Hawk.
Over the following years,
followers of the religion push deeper into the state,
further shrinking Ute territories.
This is a story that we see
repeated throughout the United States.
They had no plans of retreating.
They were going to be in this space for
a very long time, and they felt entitled to it.
NARRATOR: However, the Mormons don't hold onto
the land in the aerial images for long.
In 1952, the federal government purchases the valley,
builds a dam, and turns it into a reservoir.
They would have had to pack up their homes
and businesses and sell them to the government.
Any standing structures were demolished, literally bulldozed.
After surviving 100 years of everything Utah could throw
at it, this settlement is suddenly flooded.
NARRATOR: The reservoir's waters may soon reclaim
this relic of Utah's unique history.
Until then, it endures as a reminder of some
of the controversial events which helped form
early America.
It's really amazing to think of how many different
and diverse chapters
of U.S. history played out in this one small town.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the killer river.
The river has claimed so many lives,
it's become known as China's sorrow.
NARRATOR: And the land of the lost.
This island becomes a dumping ground
for society's unwanted people.
NARRATOR: June 1, 2022 -- as a satellite
studies the coastline of Southeast China,
it captures a mystery on the outskirts of Shanghai.
SZULGIT: This is a really interesting image.
We're used to seeing city blocks that are square
or rectangular,
but this one's kind of a radiating circular pattern.
What's even stranger is that much of
it seems to be filled with water.
This lake at the center is easily a mile
and a half across -- it's a perfect circle,
and it is enormous.
NARRATOR: The strange circular mini city is dissected
by a series of rivers or canals.
KOUROUNIS: I can see waterways connecting from this lake
back towards the city of Shanghai,
but there are also waterways connecting to the ocean nearby.
So I wonder if there's some link
between that and what we're seeing here.
NARRATOR: Analysts turn to local land records.
They reveal that the 1.6-mile-wide superstructure
is an attempt to prevent a disaster that threatens
millions of lives.
What we're looking at in the image is something that's
designed to deal with
a problem that China has been plagued with for thousands
of years, and that is flooding.
NARRATOR: Catastrophic floods have plagued China since before
the country's first ruling dynasty in the 21st century BCE.
The worst floods in human history
have taken place in China
China often experiences heavy rains at the same time that
the water, ice, and snowpack
in the mountains melts, and all of this water combines to make
its rivers immensely destructive.
NARRATOR: According to legend, the first attempts to tame
China's raging rivers takes place around 2000 BCE.
It is masterminded by Da Yu,
known as Yu the Great,
who goes on to become the first emperor of China.
Yu the Great is this almost mythical figure who devised
a system of canals, essentially
to divide up these mighty rivers and weaken their flow,
making them less prone to flooding.
NARRATOR: However, over the following centuries,
thousands more floods devastate his country.
One, on the Yellow River in 1887,
kills almost a million people.
The Yellow River has claimed so many lives,
it's become known as China's Sorrow.
It must be terrifying for the people that live there,
knowing that, at almost any time, it could wreak terrible
destruction on them.
NARRATOR: Today, the threat of flooding
in China is worse than ever.
Experts warn that 98 percent of China's urban
centers are in critical danger of being inundated.
It's bad enough that climate change
is causing much more rain every year,
but add to that the fact that there is so much urban sprawl.
Whenever you put down concrete,
it gives less places for this water to go.
NARRATOR: Between 2011 and 2013, China laid more concrete than
the United States did in the entire 20th century.
This can be extremely dangerous for people who live
in cities -- cities aren't good at absorbing water,
and so they're prone to flash flooding.
NARRATOR: Shanghai, where the circular
mega project is located, is especially vulnerable.
As well as the threat posed by the Yangtze River,
typhoons regularly batter the coast,
and the number of times they make landfall is increasing.
MORGAN: The population is suffering tremendously.
Homes are washed away, loved ones are killed,
and the government is not content to sit by
and do nothing while that happens.
NARRATOR: The site in the image is
the Chinese authorities' solution to this crisis.
It's called a sponge city.
The essence of a sponge city isn't to stop the water,
it's to hold onto it for a while so that you don't end up
with catastrophic floods.
SZULGIT: This manmade lake and these waterways are designed
to help take some of the strain
off the city's slow drainage by absorbing some of that overflow.
It's an ingenious solution to a deadly problem.
NARRATOR: Every element of the 30-square-mile, $120 million
development is designed to combat the threat
posed by flooding.
These sponge cities incorporate various techniques,
like underground water tanks,
manmade wetlands, and rooftop gardens, to help control how
fast the water gets absorbed into the ground.
The wide streets have been built with permeable pavements.
That allows the rainfall to
soak into the ground rather than running off,
allowing it to be controlled and not quite so destructive.
NARRATOR: By 2030, China intends to install
similar technology in 30 of its cities,
hoping to end its millennia-long battle with floodwaters.
This is a really great idea and a cool concept,
but the question is, is this gonna be enough?
NARRATOR: Coming up, island of the unknown.
This island has had a long history,
and unfortunately, much of that history has been quite tragic.
NARRATOR: And the mystery of the swamp mummies.
These bodies seem to be associated with
religious practices.
NARRATOR: May 7th, 2021.
A satellite scans the New York City borough of the Bronx
and City Island,
including some of the most sought after real estate on
Earth, and captures something out of place.
There's this very unusual island on
the eastern seaboard of the United States.
New York is a very densely populated,
very expensive place to live,
but you have this island with virtually nothing on it.
NARRATOR: Elsewhere in New York,
oceanfront properties can cost tens of millions of dollars.
AUERBACH: You'd think that this would be hot property.
Everything that you can build on, you build on.
So why hasn't this island been built on?
It almost looks like New Yorkers
are intentionally avoiding this space,
for whatever reason.
NARRATOR: Analysts consult local historical records.
They reveal something extraordinary.
This island has had a long,
varied history, and unfortunately, much of that
history has been quite tragic.
According to the documents, Hart Island,
like much of New York, was once inhabited by Native Americans,
the Siwanoy.
In 1654, the tribe sells
their ancestral lands to a British settler.
After the period of colonization,
the island passed through the hands of various wealthy
private owners.
KOUROUNIS: It seems they put it to some nefarious uses,
the most famous being a venue for
some pretty serious bare knuckle boxing matches.
NARRATOR: Between 1800 and 1860, New York's population
leaps from 60,000 to over a million.
A quarter of the population are Irish immigrants, who bring
their tradition of bare knuckle fights
to the New World.
But when authorities outlaw prize fighting
in the mid-19th century,
matches moved to the island in the image,
along with many of the city's gangs and mobsters.
These matches were so notorious that thousands
of people would come over to witness them and bet on them.
This is an underground spectator sport, and people
would basically beat
each other and pummel each other and participate in
these lawless activities.
One of the story goes that there was a big match between
an Irishman and a Brit,
and the crime rate went down because so many of the criminal
types wanted to go watch the match.
KOUROUNIS: These stories are colorful and all,
but they don't really explain why the island is
abandoned today.
NARRATOR: Further aerial footage offers more clues.
Some of these large, abandoned buildings on
the island look like they once served
an official purpose.
They have this real institutional feel about them,
like a location of a horror film
where everything's just been left to rot.
NARRATOR: By 1900, New York is the second largest
and one of the wealthiest cities on Earth,
the playground of the Rockefellers, Astors,
and Vanderbilt families.
During this so-called Gilded Age,
at least half of the population also lives in poverty.
Destitution is rife, and the island in
the image takes on a new role.
BROWN: The city would send people there that
they didn't really want to deal with,
and this island kind of becomes a dumping ground for
society's unwanted groups of people.
What we know is it was home to a workhouse,
a women's psychiatric hospital, and even a prison for
delinquent boys.
NARRATOR: Yet it's the structures visible
on the southern tip of the island,
which explains its abandonment to this day.
When we look, we see a series of
white markers arranged in a quite orderly fashion.
Closer examination reveals that these are, in fact, graves.
It seems this island does indeed have some
permanent residents.
It's home to hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
NARRATOR: For more than a century,
the island is designated as a Potters Field,
a burial site for unclaimed bodies.
At the turn of the 21st century,
up to 2,500 people a year are being interred here.
The poor were buried here, criminals were also
buried here.
The mentally ill were buried here, and they
were buried by prisoners as part of their punishment.
NARRATOR: In more recent times, the island has been used
to bury casualties of
the COVID pandemic and some of the earliest victims
of the HIV virus.
At the time, there was a lot of hysteria over the disease.
So as a result, instead of giving -- being given a more
dignified burial, the bodies were taken here.
For over 140 years,
this graveyard has been the burial site
for New York City's marginalized and downtrodden.
NARRATOR: Today, there are almost a million people buried
on this seemingly empty island,
meaning it is, in fact, more than 80 times more densely
populated than Manhattan,
a symbol of our often troubled past visible from space.
This island and its soil is a cross-section of
the history of both New York and the history
of its social tensions.
NARRATOR: Coming up, gateway to the underworld.
This was the nether land between the living and the dead.
And the cloud catchers of Peru.
The concept seems like science fiction, but actually worked.
NARRATOR: April 11th, 2019.
As an orbiting camera
passes 400 miles above Wales,
it captures an image of
something that continues to puzzle experts.
We're seeing a hillside, but then there's this strange
scar on the side of it,
this big zigzag, almost like a zipper.
CEVERNEY: This is a really weird pattern.
It's not something that we would find in nature.
Nature doesn't create sawtooth patterns like this.
NARRATOR: The mystery pattern stretches for around 800 feet
down the flank of a barren, isolated mountainside.
This is a really steep slope in the wilds of Wales,
and whoever has gone in
and done this has gone to a lot of trouble to do so.
NARRATOR: To some analysts, the structure's shape
and location suggest
it is a relic of this country's often violent past.
It looks like some type of earthworks -- we're in Wales,
and Wales was in a state of almost
constant warfare with the neighboring English kingdom,
so it wasn't uncommon for them to build
these earthen work defenses,
these dykes, to try to hold back invaders.
NARRATOR: The country we now call Wales
was once ruled by several warring kingdoms.
Evidence of the battles they waged is visible
in the form of defensive earthworks littering
the landscape here.
We tend to think of fortifications as being stone,
but it's much easier to throw up dirt defenses.
So we see these all around the region.
NARRATOR: Geological records of the area
surrounding the mystery structure
reveal an abundance of peat bogs,
a marshy landscape not suited to defensive structures.
To some analysts, this instead suggests it may
have once served a ceremonial purpose.
It's possible that this is associated with rituals,
because during prehistory, people would
throw sacrificial victims into these bogs,
and it seems that it was quite a common event.
NARRATOR: Across Britain,
archaeologists have pulled the remains of over 100 bodies
from peaty marshlands like the one in the image.
They are known as bog bodies.
These bog bodies are at least 2,000 years old.
They seem to be associated with
Celtic and possibly Druidic religious practices.
NARRATOR: Peat bogs are formed of decaying
layers of plant matter and moss.
Their acidity and lack of oxygen makes them hostile to
the bacteria and microbes that normally cause bodies
to decompose.
These peat bogs have extraordinary
preservative properties -- I mean, to the point that
they actually preserve bodies much the way
an active mummification process would have.
NARRATOR: Many bodies display signs of having endured
violent deaths before being placed in the peat bogs.
It's believed they were left as offerings to the gods
in return for a good harvest or victories in battle.
In the old Celtic culture, bogs and marshes
were the watery domain,
the nether land between the living and the dead.
It seems that they didn't actually hurl the body
from the edge,
but actually built little walkways.
So it's possible that this is part
of such a ritual route into the bog.
NARRATOR: Karen Bellinger studies the image
and develops a different theory.
While the peat bogs in the area of
this image could have been involved in
ritualistic activities,
I'm thinking that this image shows
activity of a more recent nature.
NARRATOR: To Bellinger, the weird zigzag is evidence
of a practice known as peat harvesting.
Peat has been an important natural resource for humanity
throughout antiquity, but in the 12th century in Europe,
we start to see a real boom in its usage, but above all, as
a fuel source to heat homes.
NARRATOR: By the 13th century in Britain,
wood-hungry industries like shipbuilding and a growing
population mean that almost 80 percent
of its woodlands have been felled.
This forces many families to turn to the millions of acres
of peatlands that once covered this island to heat their homes.
HUNT: All across the landscape,
people would come and take it out, square foot by square foot,
and stack it and carry it away to be burned.
Peat, because of its carbon capture properties,
stores an immense amount of energy.
It's so effective that it's actually
outstripped wood as a source of heat.
NARRATOR: Over the following centuries,
harvesters here in Britain and across the continent
strip vast tracts of peatlands for fertilizer and fuel.
In some European countries, this plunder accounts
for around 10 percent of their entire surface area.
Like chopping down trees, harvesting peat is
heavy manual labor, I mean,
you are literally carving slabs of turf out of the ground,
and the process is known as peat cutting.
NARRATOR: A single peat cutter can remove
thousands of slabs per week.
The zigzag shape in the image could have been
a way for them to move their harvest
across the steep terrain.
RUBEN: They would extract it and pile it on sleds,
but then they needed a way to
get the sleds down the mountain safely.
You can't have these things in straight channels,
or the sledges would just careen
down the mountain, so you have to cut them
on the diagonal like this.
NARRATOR: For now, this is just a theory.
The exact purpose of the scar
on the Welsh hillside remains a mystery,
a gateway into this country's long,
rich history, waiting to be deciphered.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the Atacama cipher.
You've got a checkerboard out in the middle of the desert,
which really doesn't make any sense.
NARRATOR: May 10th, 2022.
A satellite scans the desolate mountains of
western Peru and captures something that baffles analysts.
SALAITA: All around,
we're seeing just dry desert, it looks like,
but right there is a big, black square.
It's just bizarre.
This gigantic square really stands out
against the arid desert in the background.
It really does look out of place.
NARRATOR: Anthony Morgan studies the mystery structure
in more detail.
MORGAN: From a distance, there's clearly a grid pattern,
but as you move closer, that pattern
only becomes more complex, like woven cloth.
NARRATOR: The structure reminds Morgan of ingenious pieces
of engineering found throughout these arid deserts.
Innovators in Peru have found ways
to turn fog into drinking water,
and they look similar to our image.
NARRATOR: The structures are called fog catchers,
and in this part of the world, they're a lifesaver.
The Pacific coast of Peru is one
of the driest areas on the planet.
It typically gets about a half inch of rain per year.
CEVERNEY: There have been times where it hasn't rained
for decades, so water is a very critical issue
for the people who live here.
NARRATOR: When cold air from the nearby Pacific Ocean
hits Peru's warm coastal deserts,
it forms towering blankets of fog,
which sweep up into the mountains.
The idea is to use very fine nets capable of collecting
condensation from fog
and draining it to a location where it can be used
by locals.
The concept of fog nets seems like science fiction,
but it actually works.
NARRATOR: Other analysts think the giant grid is
dedicated to a different type of science.
KOUROUNIS: Looking a little closer at the arrangement
gives me a bit of a clue,
in that perhaps this is a giant array of
dipole antennas.
ORWOLL: Dipole antennas are used from everything from
transmitting television to listening
to your local FM station.
But when you put this many of them together in one location,
now you're talking about something very
significant going on at this site.
NARRATOR: Local records confirm the array contains more than
18,000 dipole antennae,
dedicated to studying the mysterious boundary between
Earth and space.
So what we have here is the Jicamarca
Radio Observatory.
It's one of the largest radars in
the world and is used to study the ionosphere.
NARRATOR: The ionosphere is a 190-mile-thick layer
of charged particles formed by solar energy smashing into
the Earth's atmosphere.
For billions of years, it has
shielded our planet from lethal solar radiation.
But with the advent of spaceflight,
scientists discover that this force field is a major
obstacle to humankind's ambition to explore the cosmos.
They find that the ionosphere makes communicating with
manned spacecraft or satellites really difficult and unreliable.
When radio waves pass through this layer of the atmosphere,
they are impacted by the ionosphere,
and we need to know how,
because this impacts our communications to space.
NARRATOR: Construction of the observatory begins in 1960.
By bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere,
scientists measure its density and thickness,
helping them better understand
how to communicate with spacecraft.
What they find is that the ionosphere is constantly in
a state of flux -- when it's daytime on Earth, the ionosphere
above grows -- when it's nighttime, it shrinks,
but it's also affected by weather, both powerful storms
on Earth or solar storms from the sun.
NARRATOR: Observatories like Jicamarca have been critical to
the thousands of satellites and spacecraft
launched over the past six decades,
but its success has presented it with a new challenge.
This site is also studying what we call space junk.
Space junk is garbage in orbit,
basically, and it can be anything from used-up entire
stages of rockets to things as small as paint chips from
the space shuttle decades ago.
NARRATOR: There are around 200,000 pieces of space junk,
from two-fifths of an inch to 4 inches in diameter,
currently hurtling through orbits at speeds of up to
18,000 miles per hour.
One problem that we're worried about is if there is
a cascading effect, if one piece of space junk hits a satellite,
destroys that satellite, and then the pieces of space junk
from that impact move on to
destroy more satellites and more satellites.
NARRATOR: By forensically tracking this debris,
the site in the image protects us from the very craft it
helped put into space.
JRO helps monitor the movement of these pieces of space junk,
the small ones, the large ones, and we can then move that
spacecraft early enough so that
we don't have a catastrophic impact with Earth.