What is Space Debris?
By: Horace Mann Robotics Team
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What is Space Debris?
Space debris is also known as space junk. When rockets launch, the parts that hold fuel fall off after they are depleted, so they don't weigh down the spaceship. However, when they fall off, they just stay in orbit. They go at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour, meaning that if these parts bump into each other, they will break into a million more pieces! There are currently over a hundred million pieces of space debris in orbit around the earth! If any one of these pieces bump into a rocket or satellite, it will be immediately destroyed.
NASA Says:
"Orbital debris is the number one threat to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. Collisions with orbital debris can pit or damage spacecraft in the best case scenario and cause catastrophic failures in the worst. Averaging speeds of 10 km/s (22,000 mph), a 1-centimeter paint fleck is capable of inflicting the same damage as a 550-pound object traveling 60 miles per hour on earth. A 10-centimeter projectile would be comparable to 7 kilograms of TNT. It is easy to see how collisions of orbital debris traveling at such high speeds pose a grave threat to our space program."
Amber Yang's Technology:
Amber Yang is a 19-year-old who studies science and computer programming. She is a physics major at Stanford University and founder of Seer Tracking. She created an AI program on her computer to predict where a piece of space debris will be. She can also take a model rocket ship and see if it's on a collision course with space debris. With this information, Yang can alert a rocket ship to move out of the way. She does this by taking the data of satellites and spacecraft. She uses this information to foretell if there will be space debris collisions. Her solution is to use an artificial neural network which is like the human mind to track space debris and it will predict the orbit of space debris. In addition, if the network doesn't give an accurate prediction, it will try to figure out what it did wrong. This means that it will be able to get better every time it tries to track something. This is helpful for astronauts and spacecraft to avoid collisions and set times for spaceships to launch safely. Therefore, Amber Yang's technology was to set up artificial neural networks to predict the orbit of space debris which inspired our idea to set up sensors that do a similar thing but swat the debris away.