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.

Check it out and subscribe for more videos.