Brian Murphy was jolted awake by a dream of a meteoroid storm slamming into Earth—but it wasn’t our planet’s surface that worried him. It was what floated above it: satellites, the silent engines of modern life, suddenly at risk. That dream sparked a plan that just won Murphy and his colleague Richard Cannon the 2024 Schweickart Prize, a $10,000 award recognizing bold new ideas in planetary defense. Their proposal, called WARDEN—Warning Network for Asset Resilience From Dusts, Ejecta and NEOs—aims to protect not just people, but the growing web of space infrastructure that powers global communications, weather forecasting, and national security.
For decades, planetary defense focused on Earth-bound asteroids large enough to cause mass extinction. But with over 17,000 satellites now orbiting our planet—up from fewer than 1,000 in 2009—the sky has become a crowded highway. Tiny meteoroids, harmless when they burn up in the atmosphere, become high-speed hazards in space, capable of crippling multi-million-dollar spacecraft. The European Space Agency’s Olympus 1 satellite was lost to a Perseid meteoroid storm in 1993, and Landsat 5 likely suffered a similar fate in 2009. As SpaceX’s Starlink and other mega-constellations expand, Murphy and Cannon calculate that exposure to meteoroid threats has increased tenfold to a hundredfold.
Their solution is both practical and visionary: an international commission to assess risks to space assets, followed by the creation of WARDEN, a global coordinating body modeled on existing asteroid-monitoring efforts. WARDEN would integrate data from ground and space-based sensors to predict meteoroid storms and issue warnings, allowing satellite operators to reposition or shield vulnerable systems. The researchers point to specific deadlines: meteoroid storms in 2028, 2033, and 2034, some of the most intense on record, could pose serious risks to unprepared infrastructure. “Even when we had a hundredth of the assets in space, there was still damage that was in the $1.2 billion range,” Murphy said. “If we have 100 times that now, and potentially 1,000 times that in the next decade… this is going to be a big problem.”
The B612 Foundation, which administers the Schweickart Prize in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, praised the proposal for its foresight. As human presence in space grows—from lunar bases to orbital fuel depots—the need for a coordinated defense system becomes urgent. Murphy and Cannon will receive their award at Lowell Observatory on June 27, but their real prize, they hope, is action. The dream that started it all may soon become a safeguard for the satellites we depend on—and the future of life beyond Earth.