Removing space junk using Artificial Intelligence

Description

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.

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/removing-space-junk-using-artificial-intelligence/article33023657.ece?homepage=true