Space domain awareness, autonomous satellites, data centres in orbit - AI opens up brave new world

NEW DELHI: (Feb 14) A tiny piece of junk may be harmless on Earth, but even the slightest impact from such debris hurtling through space at high speed can prove fatal for a spacecraft.

There are more than a million such objects of one centimetre in size and bigger orbiting the Earth, tracked continuously by experts to prevent collision accidents that can put a billion-dollar space mission in jeopardy.

Space engineers in India and across the world are using artificial intelligence to track more than a million orbits of such debris to determine their possible collision with active satellites and space assets.