The satellites that run your weather forecasts, your television, and a significant portion of global communications all occupy a narrow band of space 36,000 kilometers above the equator. They share that neighborhood with debris. Some of it is the size of a bus. Some of it, as a new study reveals, is the size of a hand. Researchers led by the University of Warwick have used a novel image processing technique to detect some of the faintest fragments ever observed in geosynchronous orbit, finding pieces as small as 5 centimeters across in a region so distant that the debris will stay there, undisturbed, essentially forever. Nearly 80 percent of the faint objects they found did not appear in any publicly available catalogue. The Orbit That Never Clears Itself Geosynchronous orbit is unusual. A satellite placed there moves at exactly the right speed to keep pace with Earth’s rotation, which is why weather satellites seem to hover in one spot and why a single satellite can beam signals to an entire continent. That fixed geometry makes …