NASA recently repurposed a satellite called WISE that had completed its mission with all instruments intact and quite a bit of fuel. Renaming the mission NEOWISE, the space agency gave the satellite a new job: map the entire volume of space in the vicinity of Earth’s orbit around the sun, looking for every possible rock, boulder, or planetoid that could possibly smack into our Blue Marble. What they discovered caused them to build an entirely new model of the space debris in our immediate area (see image above).