奇速英语

美17岁女孩开发出一套可预测太空垃圾走向的计算机程序

We’ve left trash in space, where it can be a danger to satellites and astronauts. Already, over 500,000 pieces of space trash orbit Earth. They come from old satellites and other objects humans have sent into space. Each travels at over 28,000 kilometers per hour. At speeds like that, even tiny flecks(微粒) of dust can harm spacecraft — and any passengers.

Growing up near Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Amber Yang, the 17-year-old senior at Trinity Preparatory School in Winter Park, Fla, has always been interested in space. But she didn’t think about space junk until 2013, during which debris from an old satellite collided with an active Russian satellite. The space trash slammed into the satellite, knocking it off course and out of commission.

So Amber decided to come up with her own method — one that could use the knowledge of where space junk has been to more accurately predict where it would go next. She used her computer to create an artificial neural(神经系统的) network, for which she started with a set of rules called Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Amber’s computer program applied Kepler’s laws to data on the locations of space trash. She hoped her artificial neural network could use those data to figure out where that junk could go next. If those predictions turned out to be wrong, her program could learn from those mistakes to do better in the future.

“When I first started out with my research,” Amber says, “I had a hard time finding data for space debris.” So she randomly generated her own data. The next year, though, Amber discovered space-track.org, which provides a free record of space debris.

She downloaded data on the locations of space debris from May 25 to June 9 , 2016. She then asked her program to use those data to predict where the trash would be on June 12. She compared her program’s answer to the actual locations of the space trash. “I had 98 percent accuracy,” she says.