Strathclyde to lead AI space project

The year-long collaboration includes the University of Arizona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Waterloo in Canada, The Alan Turing Institute and space companies, LMO and GMV in the UK, Nominal Systems in Australia and Columbiad in Canada.

One of the biggest challenges facing the sector is space debris. According to the UK Space Agency, almost 37,000 items of space debris measuring larger than 10cm and an estimated 130 million under 1cm orbit Earth. NASA estimates that as of January 2022, the amount of material orbiting the Earth exceeded 9,000 metric tons.

The human-deposited mass ranges from defunct satellites to smaller items that include flecks of paint.

One of the key aims of the ‘AI4 Space Safety and Sustainability’ project will be to use machine learning to help predict the motion of space objects, reducing the risk of collisions and improving space flight safety.

In a statement, project lead, Professor Massimiliano Vasile, director of the Aerospace Centre of Excellence, said: “The sustainability of the use of space is essential to enable any future space activity. The sector is based on a model that isn’t sustainable because we keep on launching materials into space – meaning there is a constant drain we take from Earth.