Orbits in Focus: A New Era of Space Traffic Management

Space is getting incredibly crowded. With over 40,000 tracked objects zipping around at ten times the speed of a bullet, managing our orbits has shifted from a traffic problem to a critical national security mission.

In this episode, we discover Project Aemelia, a pioneering initiative funded by the UK Space Agency. We see how a collaboration between the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Birmingham is rewriting the rules of Space Domain Awareness (SDA).

Join host Amelia Jabry, Dr Victoria Nockles, Principal Investigator - Defence AI Research (DARe), and Professor Marina Gashinova, University of Birmingham, to explore:

The Space-to-Space Challenge: Why observing fast-moving satellites from other satellites is an engineering hurdle of cosmic proportions.

SAR vs. ISAR: How Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) is being used to map the 3D structures of uncooperative satellites, rockets, and orbital debris in real time.

Autonomous Missions: How researchers on project Aemelia are going one step further and not just looking at new imaging systems, but designing fully-autonomous space missions.

Whether it's defending vital communications satellites or dodging space debris, find out how autonomous digital twins are safeguarding our future above the clouds.

Read more about Project Aemelia here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/aemelia

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/eese/gashinova-marina

Chapter markers

0:00 Intro – the tricky problem of tracking satellites in space

1:44 What is space domain awareness?