Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
courtesy Amber Yang
College first-year Amber Yang has won a number of prizes for her method of predicting the path of orbital debris. Scroll through to find out why these often tiny piece of matter in Earth's orbit pose such a problem for space missions.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA Ames Research Center
Space debris is an issue NASA has been aware of since our first excursions beyond Earth. One recent report stated that debris as small as 0.12 inches across "could pose danger to human spaceflight." This photo, taken in August 1960, shows a 0.8 inch piece of polyethylene hitting an aluminum target at 19,500 feet per second, as part of an impact test conducted by NASA's Ames Research Center.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
European Space Agency
Hyper-velocity testing is a key part of engineering spacecraft fit for orbit. This 2009 image from the European Space Agency shows the effect of a 0.47 inch, 0.06 ounce aluminum ball hitting a 7-inch thick aluminum block at 4.2 miles per second. The agency says the pressure and temperature of such an impact "exceeds those found at the center of the Earth."
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA
This 2004 image shows an "eyebolt," a two-inch component which had detached from a solar array. Along with spent rockets and dead satellites, other objects -- including a $100,000 tool kit and the creator of "Star Trek's" ashes -- have ended up in orbit. Some will quickly slip out of orbit and burn up on reentry, while others will circle the planet for years. Intersecting orbits can cause a huge hazard for satellites and space stations.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA Orbital Debris Program
A close-up photograph showing the damage sustained by the Solar MAX experiment from a tiny piece of space debris. Today the International Space Station has a number of debris protocols, from maneuvering out of a collision path to sheltering in a Soyuz capsule when the probability of a significant collision is high.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA/Orbital Debris Program
A number of magnified images showing "pitting" in space shuttle windows. The glass used was extremely strong, but could be damaged by debris as small as a fleck of paint. Today the International Space Station's cupola observation windows are quadruple glazed, but are still susceptible to miniscule pieces of debris.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA/Lockheed Martin/IMAX
The Long Duration Exposure Facility (picture top) seen before deployment by Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984. Containing a number of experiments, it was left in low Earth orbit until 1990. Upon retrieval analysts counted over 20,000 impacts on the satellite according to NASA's Orbital Debris Program.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
NASA/Orbital Debris Program
A picture from NASA's Orbital Debris Program mapping the many impact points on panels from the Hubble Space Telescope. The US Department of Defense tracks thousands of objects in orbit, and can forewarn satellite owners when significant debris is on its way. But the US Space Surveillance Network only tracks objects four inches and larger, meaning pieces fractions of an inch wide slip through and can cause damage.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
iGoal Animation/NASA
In December 2017, NASA released details of its Space Debris Sensor, a new addition to the International Space Station. It will record instances of debris between 0.002-0.02 inches wide for two to three years, using an acoustic system to measure size, speed, direction and density.
Photos: Space debris: Small objects, big problem
PHOTO:
courtesy Amber Yang
As we fill low Earth orbit with more debris, the likelihood of a significant collision increases. Yang's software, now used by her company Seer Tracking, has won a number of awards for its use of an artificial neural network to predict the future path of debris. She says she has received attention from a number of private companies looking to launch satellites into space.
Story highlights
Yang's prize-winning project models the path of space debris
The software uses an artificial neural network, designed to replicate the learning process of the brain
She claims it can predict orbit paths more accurately than current technology
Editor’s Note: This feature is part of Tomorrow’s Hero, a series profiling young innovators transforming the world for a brighter future. Discover their stories here.
(CNN) —
After watching “Gravity,” Amber Yang started having nightmares.
The ninth-grader and astrophysics enthusiast from Windermere, Florida was naturally drawn the film, which imagined an astronaut’s desperate escape to Earth after the destruction of a NASA space shuttle.
“Gravity” bent some rules of physics, broke others, but its most terrifying plot device was, in theory, true. A phenomenon known as the Kessler syndrome, it’s a scenario in which low Earth orbit – home to the International Space Station and other satellites – has reached a critical density of objects. An explosion, or collision between two objects with intersecting orbits, creates debris, setting off an exponential chain of collisions causing a catastrophic breakup of objects above Earth.
PHOTO:
Warner Bros./Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
"Gravity" (2013) was loosely based on a destructive orbital event known as the Kessler syndrome.
The implications are chastening, with the debris belt limiting our ability to reenter space for a significant amount of time.
Yang, now a college first year, has moved on from the nightmares. She’s too busy trying to stop a space debris calamity from ever happening.
Faster than a speeding bullet
Low Earth orbit, starting a few hundred miles up, contains millions of objects, ranging from space stations and rocket boosters to flecks of paint. Traveling 10 times faster than a bullet, a speck of debris less than half an inch wide can impact with the force of a hand grenade, meaning no object is benign.
The European Space Agency says for many missions, space debris impact represents the third highest risk of losing a spacecraft behind risks associated with launch and deployment in orbit. Avoiding collisions requires constant monitoring and intervention – the US Department of Defense’s Space Surveillance Network makes hundreds of thousands of observations every day.
Timothy Payne, chief of operations assessments division at Headquarters Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), told CNN that AFSPC “routinely provides to NASA satellite predictions 10 days into the future to support collision avoidance,” but did not elaborate as to how these predictions were made.
But Yang says she’s developed a new way to predict orbits more accurately, and do so weeks into the future. What’s more, she’s won a number of prizes for her solution.
The neural network
“I started researching when I was in my second year of high school,” she told CNN. Yang looked at current tracking methods – ground and space-based sensors and radars – as well as predictive methods such as an extended Kalman filter, a mathematical algorithm dating from the time of the Apollo program she says some organizations still use. (Payne confirmed AFSPC is not among them.)
PHOTO:
NASA Orbital Debris Program
A close-up photograph showing damage sustained by the Solar Max experiment from a tiny piece of orbital debris.
By 2016 Yang had turned to artificial neural networks, a computing system designed to replicate the learning process of the human brain. They can be used to identify patterns – patterns like orbital debris paths.
Using computer modeling software with a neural network tool, Yang began programming software of her own. She inputted various laws of physics and refined the parameters of her neural network. “It was a new experience for me,” she says, “I hadn’t really done much coding beforehand.”
To her network she added the coordinates of space debris available to the public online (accessible via Space-Track. You can see a model of this real-time data set via stuffin.space). In June 2016, Yang asked her network to predict three days ahead using 16 days-worth of back data. She says it was 98% accurate.
“There definitely is a threshold limit as to the accuracy, the further in advance you go,” she cautions, but says it compares favorably to other methods. Moreover, the network is evolving.
“Artificial intelligence basically operates on the fact that it can be relearned and retrained,” she adds. “So the more data I have… the more accurate the predictions will be.”
Founding a company in college
Yang entered her project into multiple competitions. By the end of the year she had presented her finding at CERN, attended the White House Frontiers Conference, and delivered an impassioned TEDx talk containing powerful insights about the obstacles facing women in STEM industries.
She’s now studying physics while running Seer Tracking, a commercial enterprise looking to license out her software.
“I’m getting a lot of consumer interest from private space corporations,” Yang says. “Startup companies trying to launch different things into space are very interested in my work, because it’s essentially very low-cost,” she adds, comparing her neural network to sensors and radars.
PHOTO:
courtesy Amber Yang
A screenshot of Yang's software, which predicts the flight path of space debris via an artificial neural network.
“It is still a bit too early to put an exact price tag on my software,” Yang said in a followup email, “however, current space startups that are providing debris mapping services charge around $750,000 to $1 million for one license.” None, she said, use artificial neural networks.
Yang notes that no government space agency has contacted her thus far. CNN asked US AFSPC for their thoughts:
“We currently do not use neural networks for predicting orbital paths although we do think neural networks are well worth consideration and study for other areas related to satellite operations,” said Payne.
“Nonetheless,” he added, “we are very impressed with such a young scientist showing interest in the area of satellite orbit prediction and the capability to develop a neural network to predict them.”
Looking ahead, Yang says she plans to go further in developing her software’s accuracy, and is exploring convolutional neural networks and deep learning (“A lot of people think it’s the next driving force in machine learning,” she says).
And as for going into space, and the potential catastrophe she’s trying to avert?
“If ever have the opportunity to go I still would. So far we haven’t had any dangers to astronauts yet – hopefully it remains that way.”
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Anirudh Chiti/MIT
This image shows the vicinity of the Tucana II ultrafaint dwarf galaxy, captured by the SkyMapper telescope.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
I. Heywood/Oxford/Rhodes/SARAO
These images show two giant radio galaxies found with using the MeerKAT telescope. The red in both images shows the radio light being emitted by the galaxies against a background of the sky as it is seen in visible light.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
This artist's conception of quasar J0313-1806 depicts it as it was 670 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are highly energetic objects at the centers of galaxies, powered by black holes and brighter than entire galaxies.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Zolt Levay/Space Telescope Science Institute
Shown here is a phenomenon known as zodiacal light, which is caused by sunlight reflecting off tiny dust particles in the inner solar system.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
M. Kornmesser/ESO
This artist's impression of the distant galaxy ID2299 shows some of its gas being ejected by a "tidal tail" as a result of a merger between two galaxies.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Laurent Chemin/ESA/Gaia/DPAC
This diagram shows the two most important companion galaxies to the Milky Way: the Large Magellanic Cloud (left) and the Small Magellanic Cloud. It was made using data from the European Space Agency Gaia satellite.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Seibert/K. Hoadley/GALEX Team
The Blue Ring Nebula is thought to be a never-before-seen phase that occurs after the merger of two stars. Debris flowing out from the merger was sliced by a disk around one of the stars, creating two cones of material glowing in ultraviolet light.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
ESO/M. Montargès et al.
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, experienced unprecedented dimming late in 2019. This image was taken in January using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
European Southern Observatory
This is an infrared image of Apep, a Wolf-Rayet star binary system located 8,000 light-years from Earth.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.
An artist's illustration, left, helps visualize the details of an unusual star system, GW Orionis, in the Orion constellation. The system's circumstellar disk is broken, resulting in misaligned rings around its three stars.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno, MPIGP, SXS Collaboration
This is a simulation of two spiral black holes that merge and emit gravitational waves.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser
This artist's illustration shows the unexpected dimming of the star Betelgeuse.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Rizzo et al./ALMA/European Southern Observatory
This extremely distant galaxy, which looks similar to our own Milky Way, appears like a ring of light.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University
This artist's interpretation shows the calcium-rich supernova 2019ehk. The orange represents the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple reveals gas shed by the star right before the explosion.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Northwestern University
The blue dot at the center of this image marks the approximate location of a supernova event which occurred 140 million light-years from Earth, where a white dwarf exploded and created an ultraviolet flash. It was located close to tail of the Draco constellation.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
From NASA/JPL
This radar image captured by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in 1991 shows a corona, a large circular structure 120 miles in diameter, named Aine Corona.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Mark Garlick/University of Warwick
When a star's mass is ejected during a supernova, it expands quickly. Eventually, it will slow and form a hot bubble of glowing gas. A white dwarf will emerge from this gas bubble and move across the galaxy.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
International Gemini Observatory/K. Paterson/W. Fong/Northwestern University
The afterglow of short gamma ray burst that was detected 10 billion light-years away is shown here in a circle. This image was taken by the Gemini-North telescope.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Hubble Space Telescope/NASA/ESA/M. Stiavelli
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7513, a barred spiral galaxy 60 million light-years away. Due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxy appears to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerate rate.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
L. Calçada/ESO
This artist's concept illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy may have looked like before it mysteriously disappeared.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Robert Hurt/California Institute of Technology
This is an artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding disk of gas. Inside this disk are two smaller black holes orbiting one another. Researchers identified a flare of light suspected to have come from one such binary pair soon after they merged into a larger black hole.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration
This image, taken from a video, shows what happens as two objects of different masses merge together and create gravitational waves.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Kristi Mickaliger
This is an artist's impression showing the detection of a repeating fast radio burst seen in blue, which is in orbit with an astrophysical object seen in pink.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
ICRAR
Fast radio bursts, which make a splash by leaving their host galaxy in a bright burst of radio waves, helped detect "missing matter" in the universe.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
Giacomo Terreran/Northwestern University
A new type of explosion was found in a tiny galaxy 500 million light-years away from Earth. This type of explosion is referred to as a fast blue optical transient.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
James Josephides/Swinburne Astronomy Productions
Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy described as a "cosmic ring of fire." This artist's illustration shows the galaxy as it existed 11 billion years ago.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello
This is an artist's impression of the Wolfe Disk, a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early universe.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
ESO/Boccaletti et al.
A bright yellow "twist" near the center of this image shows where a planet may be forming around the AB Aurigae star. The image was captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
European Southern Observatory/ESO/L. Calçada
This artist's illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light-years from Earth. This system includes one star (small orbit seen in blue) orbiting a newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a wider orbit (also in blue).
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
NASA/CXO/CSIC-INTA/G.Miniutti et al./CXC/M. Weiss
This illustration shows a star's core, known as a white dwarf, pulled into orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole rips off more material from the star and pulls it into a glowing disk of material around the black hole. Before its encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the last stages of stellar evolution.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
M. Kornmesser/ESA/NASA
This artist's illustration shows the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. The observation of the aftermath of this collision was once thought to be an exoplanet.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
NRAO/AUI/NSF/S. Dagnello
This is an artist's impression of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov as it travels through our solar system. New observations detected carbon monixide in the cometary tail as the sun heated the comet.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
European Southern Observatory/ESO/L. Calçada
This rosette pattern is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Photos: Wonders of the universe
PHOTO:
M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
This is an artist's illustration of SN2016aps, which astronomers believe is the brightest supernova ever observed.