full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Moriba Jah: The world's first crowdsourced space traffic monitoring system

Unscramble the Blue Letters


I am an astrodynamicist — you know, like that guy Rich Purnell in the movie "The mratian." And it's my job to study and predict moiton of objects in space. Currently we tcrak about one percent of hazardous objects on orbit — hazardous to services like location, agriculture, banking, television and communications, and soon — very soon — even the internet itself.

Now these services are not protected from, rloghuy, half a million objects the size of a secpk of paint all the way to a school bus in size. A speck of paint, tenvalrig at the right speed, impacting one of these objects, could render it absolutely useless. But we can't track things as small as a speck of paint. We can only track things as small as say, a smartphone. So of this half million oebjcts that we should be concerned about, we can only track about 26,000 of these objects. And of these 26,000, only 2,000 actually work. Everything else is garbage. That's a lot of ggaarbe.

Open Cloze


I am an astrodynamicist — you know, like that guy Rich Purnell in the movie "The _______." And it's my job to study and predict ______ of objects in space. Currently we _____ about one percent of hazardous objects on orbit — hazardous to services like location, agriculture, banking, television and communications, and soon — very soon — even the internet itself.

Now these services are not protected from, _______, half a million objects the size of a _____ of paint all the way to a school bus in size. A speck of paint, _________ at the right speed, impacting one of these objects, could render it absolutely useless. But we can't track things as small as a speck of paint. We can only track things as small as say, a smartphone. So of this half million _______ that we should be concerned about, we can only track about 26,000 of these objects. And of these 26,000, only 2,000 actually work. Everything else is garbage. That's a lot of _______.

Solution


  1. roughly
  2. objects
  3. traveling
  4. motion
  5. martian
  6. track
  7. speck
  8. garbage

Original Text


I am an astrodynamicist — you know, like that guy Rich Purnell in the movie "The Martian." And it's my job to study and predict motion of objects in space. Currently we track about one percent of hazardous objects on orbit — hazardous to services like location, agriculture, banking, television and communications, and soon — very soon — even the internet itself.

Now these services are not protected from, roughly, half a million objects the size of a speck of paint all the way to a school bus in size. A speck of paint, traveling at the right speed, impacting one of these objects, could render it absolutely useless. But we can't track things as small as a speck of paint. We can only track things as small as say, a smartphone. So of this half million objects that we should be concerned about, we can only track about 26,000 of these objects. And of these 26,000, only 2,000 actually work. Everything else is garbage. That's a lot of garbage.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
space traffic 7
million objects 2
space highways 2


Important Words


  1. absolutely
  2. agriculture
  3. astrodynamicist
  4. banking
  5. bus
  6. communications
  7. concerned
  8. garbage
  9. guy
  10. hazardous
  11. impacting
  12. internet
  13. job
  14. location
  15. lot
  16. martian
  17. million
  18. motion
  19. movie
  20. objects
  21. orbit
  22. paint
  23. percent
  24. predict
  25. protected
  26. purnell
  27. render
  28. rich
  29. roughly
  30. school
  31. services
  32. size
  33. small
  34. smartphone
  35. space
  36. speck
  37. speed
  38. study
  39. television
  40. track
  41. traveling
  42. useless
  43. work