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How Satellites Avoid Attacks And Space Junk While Circling The Earth

The following is written by Oracle BRANDVOICE Brand Contributer, Alan Zeichick:

If you saw the 2013 Sandra Bullock-George Clooney science-fiction movie Gravity, then you know about the silent but deadly damage that even a small object can do if it hits something like the Hubble telescope, a satellite, or even the International Space Station as it hurtles through space. If you didn’t see Gravity, a non-spoiler, one-word summary would be “disaster.”

Given the thousands of satellites and pieces of man-made debris circling our planet, plus new, emerging threats from potentially hostile satellites, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that it’s important to keep track of what’s around you up there.

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But how? It all starts with the basic physics of motion and managing the tens of thousands of data points associated with those objects, says Paul Graziani, CEO and cofounder of Analytical Graphics. The Exton, Pennsylvania-based software company develops four-dimensional software that analyzes and visualizes objects based on their physical location and their time and relative position to each other or to other known locations.

Read the full story at Forbes.com