A 9th grader predicted hidden satellite collision risks, accepted at an IEEE conference

Satellite operators receive repeated warnings about possible collisions, and the dangerous cases are the ones that look safe early and turn risky later. Krishik formalized this hidden-escalation problem and trained models on the trajectory of risk messages, using only data available two days before closest approach. Across 10,460 real encounter events, he found that 25% of the eventually high-risk cases were invisible to standard threshold rules at that point, and his trajectory features lifted ROC-AUC on that hard group from 0.885 to 0.915.