There are currently approximately 160 million objects in orbit – mainly debris – which could collide with satellites vital to services we use every day. Estimates of the amount of space debris in orbit vary, from around 900,000 pieces of space junk larger than 1cm to over 160 million orbital objects in total. Only a fraction of this debris can currently be tracked and avoided by working satellites.
The UK Space Agency set out on a mission committing funding to combat space debris. To tackle this challenge, Fujitsu is working with Astroscale, University of Glasgow and AWS to successfully combine quantum-inspired computing and Artificial Intelligence to transform space debris removal.