Removing space junk using Artificial Intelligence
Context: The European Space Agency (ESA) has set a mission to burn up Vespa, an obsolete payload adapter orbiting 660 kilometers above the Earth, by 2025.
- Vespa was once part of the ESA’s Vega rocket.
- To help the European Space Agency remove space debris, a team of researchers is developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technology.
- A camera attached to it will be used to identify the Vespa that researchers believe is a challenge as nobody has really seen the space junk.
- They are developing deep learning algorithms to estimate the target from video sequences and images taken in space.
- A database of synthetic images of the target object are created, a detailed 3D model of the Vespa to train the algorithms.
- However, researchers believe that making these algorithms 100% reliable in such harsh, and relatively unknown conditions with limited computational resources, is a challenge.
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