We need to get the hell out of here.
The premise of the movie Gravity is that space debris hits the International
Space Station, it causes utter destruction which is a little unrealistic,
but that scenario is actually what people are scared of.
My name is Amber Yang I am 19 years old.
And I am a physics major college student
at Stanford University, I'm also the founder of Seer Tracking.
So we take the
data of current satellites and spacecraft and try to predict if there
will be any collisions with space debris.
So space debris is any defunct man-made
space part or spacecraft, that is orbiting in low-earth orbit right now.
They can be as small as a paint fleck to as big as a completely dead satellite.
And they often travel as fast as 17,500 miles per hour and you can only imagine
with something traveling that quickly that its impact on another orbiting
object will be extremely large
and will cause lots of damage.
This space debris
could have such a big impact on essentially the success of the American
space program and mankind's advancement into space technologies.
I watched this
series of videos that astronaut Scott Kelly published,
he would have to duck into
the Soyuz capsule which is an adjacent capsule to the International Space Station,
because there was fear that the spacecraft that he was in might be hit
by space debris.
We're just inside one minute from the
time of closest approach.
It first became like an issue around the
1950's and really in the past few decades, that number has only skyrocketed.
There is a concept that, as the space debris collide with other space debris and
other objects,
that fragmentation will cause even more space debris to occur.
Currently the method for tracking space debris is extremely inaccurate at times,
because the orbit of space debris changes so quickly.
The method that I
have introduced is using artificial neural networks and artificial
intelligence to track space debris.
It will provide a prediction, it will say
I think this is where the space debris will be in this future point in time.
And if we find the actual point in time in the future where the space debris is and
there is an error metric between the artificial neural network and where the
space debris actually is,
we can tell the neural network that oh you're wrong by
this amount.
I am basically allowing the artificial intelligence to learn the
patterns of how the space debris positions are changing over time and it
will keep training itself until its predictions are actually very very accurate.
The primary concern would be for things already orbiting in space and
trying to allow these things orbiting in space to have enough time to move out of a
collision's way,
If my software predicts that there would be a future collision.
Another thing that it could be readily used for is predicting when is the best
optimal launch time for things like NASA and SpaceX,
when they're trying to find
a time window where to launch their rockets and other space cargo. They want
to look at a window where there isn't a lot of space debris.
Right now a lot
of people are putting space debris on the back burner, they're saying it could
be potentially very dangerous someday, but right now it's not that big of a
concern because we haven't really had any casualties yet.
But the very
terrifying version of the Kessler syndrome would be a space atmosphere so
trashed, that you couldn't launch anything up without it being hit by
space debris.
The whole goal is that we're trying to preserve our Earth, our
atmosphere for future generations in front of us and in order to keep
developing technologies that will succeed and go to space,
Thanks for watching.
Now if you're interested in what it takes to get into
outer space, head over to our sister site The Verge and watch Spacecraft with
Loren Grush.
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