[HN Gopher] Live Starlink Satellite Map
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Live Starlink Satellite Map
Author : omnibrain
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-07-27 13:10 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (satellitemap.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (satellitemap.space)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (Not new)
|
| Further discussion from a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556015
| dontreact wrote:
| Why can't they have satellites orbiting over the north or south
| poles? Can anyone ELI5 this?
| rtkwe wrote:
| They could but there aren't many people up there to sell to so
| they cut down the coverage to save a lot of money on the number
| of satellites they need to launch.
| sudhirj wrote:
| They can, but I don't think they want to, that would waste
| satellites on a very low population circle.
|
| Think of each orbit as a hula hoop around the earth. You'd want
| to pack as many hoops as you can over the populated areas, with
| maybe one or two to provide the basic level of service required
| to the poles.
| 16bytes wrote:
| They technically can, but then you'd have those satellites
| spend a ton of their time over nearly unpopulated areas doing
| nothing.
|
| If you instead launch at about a 60 degrees inclination, you
| spend all of your time between N60 latitude and S60 latitude
| where it's a lot more populated. This lets you have more
| coverage in populated areas with fewer satellites.
|
| Additionally, there's no satellite to satellite link capability
| yet, so for an uplink to work you need a base station in range
| for the satellite to talk to (you can see these as a "wifi"
| symbol on the map). It's too expensive to put base stations
| pretty much anywhere in the artic.
| newuser46547 wrote:
| Earth does not show up until you enable Javascript on the page.
| dkersten wrote:
| Isn't that to be expected for a "live" map?
| newuser46547 wrote:
| Yes, but i found it kind of funny.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Dumb question, but how long do these take to de-orbit?
| papercrane wrote:
| Without propulsion they'll de-orbit in about 5 year.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I think these constallations need to move to some sort of multi-
| nation joint system.
|
| It's seems likely we'll have 5+ of these constallations up in the
| near future and all the crowding issues associated with that.
|
| It would be a great humankind project to make 1 or 2 joint
| systems. Can have relevant base station control to the individual
| nations for their political and security preferences.
| pkaye wrote:
| Each constellation could be in a slightly different elevation.
| eloff wrote:
| The volume of space is still really large though. If managed
| well, it will be fine. For some intuition around this, the
| volume is greater than the part of the atmosphere where
| airplanes fly, but the traffic is much less and more
| predictable. It's good to have some competition, additional
| capacity, and redundancy by having separate networks.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's really large until people start launching satellites
| which consist of two masses and a 50km string between them...
|
| Just a few of those, and space is full.
| gspr wrote:
| Yeah, the traffic is more predictable, but when something
| goes wrong, traffic in airspace can easily maneuver to avoid
| problems. And moreover, in airspace a disaster is local - the
| debris from a satellite collision is unpredictable and can
| stay around for years and years!
| londons_explore wrote:
| Satellites are very maneuverable too when you consider they
| normally only need to shift a few yards to avoid a
| collision, as long as their orbits can be measured
| precisely enough.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah this could go bad though there are some mitigations in
| place. These are relatively low, iirc the full satellites
| are supposed to burn up in a few years once they go offline
| without any intervention.
| mchusma wrote:
| Space is massively big. We can easily have a thousand systems
| like this without getting the density of an airport airspace.
| We should be trying to put a trillion people in space.
| gspr wrote:
| These orbits aren't that far out, so the volume available to
| them is actually comparable to that of airspace. However,
| there are some massive differences. First, in airspace you
| can easily maneuver and change directions if problems arise.
| Second, while a collision in airspace is certainly a _local_
| disaster, it 's limited in scope. A collision between
| satellites creates a giant scattering of debris with
| unpredictable orbits. Debris that can stay in orbit for years
| and years.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Airspace is usually up to flight level 600, or 60k feet.
| That's around 18km. Starlink flies at an altitude of around
| 550km, so more than a magnitude higher.
|
| How could the volume between them be in any way comparable?
| [deleted]
| gspr wrote:
| Uh, because if you wanna talk about the radii of the
| spherical shells like that, you need to consider the
| actual radii, namely the distance from the shell to the
| _center of the Earth_.
|
| In your example (which is an exaggeration, FL600 isn't
| really used for commercial flights), airspace goes from 0
| to 18 km _above the surface of the Earth_. The Earth 's
| radius itself is approximately 6400 km. So airspace is
| the shell between 6400 km and 6418 km. Starlink operates
| around 6950 km. That's not "an order of magnitude more",
| it's completely comparable to airspace, so the space
| available to the satellites scales with the shell's
| thickness in almost the same way as airspace does.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Think of it this way: the Earth's radius is ~6400km.
| Starlink orbits less than 10% higher than that.
|
| Depending on the thickness of the orbital shell there
| might be significantly more vertical space available, but
| the surface area isn't much bigger at all. (It's actually
| only ~18% larger[1].)
|
| [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%284%CF%80%28r
| adius+of...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The vertical space is _significantly_ larger, about 200km
| (400km-600km height) for usable latencies (35000km if
| we're talking any orbit) vs only 3-4km for commercial
| flights.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Nothing says success project like bureaucracies of 200 nations
| involved.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Some serious ground station coverage in Chile, South America
| already.
|
| EDIT: Deal with the Chile gov to rapidly solve for rural comms
| [1].
|
| [1] https://developingtelecoms.com/telecom-
| technology/satellite-...
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| I know this is a stupid comment, but looking at the site really
| made me appreciate how far north the UK actually is.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Gulf Stream really throws off intuitions of how North
| America and Europe line up with each other.
| divbzero wrote:
| Also makes me wonder: Are there analogs to the Gulf Stream in
| other parts of our oceans? Currents bringing warm water to
| otherwise cooler regions?
| SiVal wrote:
| Yes, though I've seen it many times on maps, from the air,
| and on the ground, I still imagine going directly east from
| Silicon Valley, across the US, through Virginia, and across
| the Atlantic ought to end up close to London or Paris. No.
| That path will take you to northern Tunisia in North Africa.
| paxys wrote:
| And the Mercator projection.
| pkaye wrote:
| You can compare the sizes of countries using this website.
|
| https://thetruesize.com/
| _Microft wrote:
| Mercator projection does not influence how far north
| something appears on a map.
|
| It is making the UK appear relatively larger than it is to
| the US though. This is because it is not an equal-area
| projection and warps areas further from the equator (UK)
| more than the ones closer (US).
| paxys wrote:
| It absolutely does. Looking at https://upload.wikimedia.o
| rg/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Mercator..., it would seem that
| the UK is a bit north of the equator, but comfortably
| within the "center".
| _Microft wrote:
| OK, I see what you mean, you were just referring to the
| unintuitive mapping between latitude and position on the
| map.
| thatguyagain wrote:
| Same here! Also, for some reason it made me think about what an
| interesting place the Arctic Ocean is, lol.
| [deleted]
| youngtaff wrote:
| Leo Labs visualisation is better in my view as it's not just
| limited to Starlink sats
|
| https://platform.leolabs.space/visualizations/leo#search=sta...
| BerkeyMcBerkey wrote:
| Given an altitude of 500-550KM, what is the approx. beam
| footprint for these satellites (individually)?
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Page 5 of this FCC filing indicates 3.5 million square
| kilometers, BUT that's assuming 1,150km altitude:
| https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8174403/S...
|
| But that may provide some information you find interesting.
|
| Edit: this previous HN discussion also touches on this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325720
| em-bee wrote:
| in settings you can enable rings. i believe those show the area
| each satellite can reach
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| About a radius of 1589 miles or 22.9 degrees.
|
| Arc length along Earth's surface = R * acos(R/(R+h))
|
| Where R is the Earth's radius, and h is the height above the
| surface.
|
| https://www.celestialprogramming.com/horizondistance.html
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| Is anyone aware of a list of when ground stations went online
| or a scheduled for future ground stations going online?
|
| I'm curious because a review of starlink that I don't think
| was all that dated, did some testing from a rural middle
| American ranch where they were unable to get a connection,
| supposedly due to the satellite being unable to connect to
| reach a ground station. The surface level reach of the
| satellites should have not been an issue though based on my
| calculations unless some base stations cam online since the
| testing done as part of the review I watched.
| sand500 wrote:
| Weren't there few in a polar orbit?
| ape4 wrote:
| Nothing over the poles yet?
| [deleted]
| JaggedJax wrote:
| They have some polar launches out of Vandenberg planned over
| the next few months: https://www.spacexnow.com/upcoming.php
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| Jeez, when visualized like that, that's a _lot_ more than I was
| expecting. How many multiples of this do they currently expect
| they want to get their vision of a general service running?
|
| Maybe a dumb question, what are the ones that seem to be a bunch
| in an arc/line? They seem to be a somewhat continuous-ish
| numbered ones, but not very strictly.
|
| Is the latitude limited by physics or just their limited
| operation? I know the really great case for this is more remote
| areas, but just wondering like the Nordics, Moscow. Doesn't get
| much more remote than Siberia. Are they just out of luck?
|
| Probably dumb questions, don't know much about space flight, just
| kind of astonished by the amount of satellites. I kind of wish it
| made more sense for me when it becomes available. My internet's
| okay, but my area is probably populated enough I might not be the
| target audience, or a place where it works out well.
| gbrown wrote:
| The ones in a line haven't reached their final orbits yet -
| they launch in clusters and then slowly separate on orbit.
| _Microft wrote:
| They have a license for 7x as many (12k vs 1.7k right now) and
| are applying for up to 30k.
|
| The bunched ones will be freshly launched batches of satellites
| that have not reached their target altitude, they will spread
| out in the process.
|
| The latitudes that they overfly are currently limited to up to
| 53deg. The explanation might not be the easiest but here it is:
| satellites go around in a circle or ellipse that lies on an
| imagined plane, the so-called orbital plane [0]. This plane can
| be at an angle with the equatorial plane which is called the
| "inclination" (this value also gives the maximum latitude that
| they reach). Starlink uses a lot of these planes, each rotated
| a bit further around the globe [1]. This is so that all areas
| on the ground will be in sight of one of the satellites
| eventually. Starlink should also be able to function a bit
| further to the north than 53deg latitude right now but for any
| latitude much higher than this, users will need to wait until
| SpaceX has a working network in polar orbits (i.e. not flying
| on these tilted plains but more or less directly over the poles
| instead). They are required to eventually serve Alaska, for
| example.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_plane_(astronomy)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_of_the_ascending_nod...
| fnord77 wrote:
| Dozens over the open ocean and uninhabited places. between zero
| and 2 over california.
|
| why did they position them this way?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Starlink is a low altitude constellation, those satellites are
| moving relative to the surface not stationary like traditional
| communication satellites. They're setup in a mesh of orbits at
| give or take the same inclination just offset in phase so
| there's some moving north east and others moving south east
| over an area at any given time. So every satellite will spend a
| lot of time over oceans just because the Earth is mostly ocean.
| dangrossman wrote:
| They're not in geo-stationary orbits. A satellite that's over
| open ocean now will be over land later in the day. If you zoom
| in on the visualization, you can see how fast they're moving.
| [deleted]
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| There are a lot of people in the ocean at any given time. This
| is exactly the type of scenario Starlink is designed for:
| providing access in very remote and rural areas.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| No it's not. Starlink requires satellites have visibility of
| a ground station and that the users dish be registered to a
| ground station. Currently neither roaming is supported nor is
| satellites communicating with other satellites to hop to a
| ground station that otherwise wouldn't be in range. Thus that
| makes Starlink inappropriate for use on ships and other
| platforms in the ocean (stationary or otherwise).
|
| Future iterations of Starlink might support this, the service
| is still in beta at the moment, but it would be a jump to
| suggest that is why there are satellites over the oceans.
|
| What's actually happening is they're not on a geo-stationary
| orbit. ie they're travelling faster than the Earth's
| rotation. So they'll spend time over land and time over the
| oceans too.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Starlink Beta users (myself included) already received an
| updated notice about Sat to Sat laser communications coming
| online in the near future. It's not a jump to say that's
| why they are over the ocean, in fact it's already been
| proven that Starlink is in use on SPACEX recovery
| platforms. Further, Starlink is working with major airlines
| already to provide faster network connectivity to
| commercial and private flight.
|
| Starlink will be available across the globe, facilitate
| land, air, and sea access. Being designed for this function
| isn't predicated on current availability. A plane is
| designed to fly, but because it's on a tarmac doesn't
| suddenly make that a false statement.
| ghshephard wrote:
| The parent had it right. They are over the ocean because
| they are in LEO and are constantly in motion relative to
| earth, it's got nothing to do with Sat-to-Sat laser
| (though that should enable access to remote areas like
| the ocean)
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Musk has already said the plan is to offer it to ocean
| going vessels. Yes, they're over the ocean because
| they're in LEO, but he put them in LEO specifically so
| they could reach those places. Whether or not it actually
| materializes can be taken with all the grains of salt you
| would normally take with anything Musk says.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They don't have to be in LEO to provide service to the
| oceans the GEO sats provide service for ocean going
| vessels. They're over the ocean because there's no way
| for them to provide solid coverage over land without
| providing solid coverage everywhere between a set N/S
| latitude band. Any gap to avoid satellites over oceans
| would be a gap over land periodically it's just how the
| orbits work.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| The reason for putting thousands in LEO, vs three in
| geostationary orbit was to limit the transmission
| latency.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It also probably has cost benefits on a per satellite and
| launch basis because it lets them use lower power
| transmitters and receivers since they're so much closer.
| Comms sats are generally much larger than the Starlinks
| with the cost of launches going up because of that.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| Another aspect is that the objective is to provide global
| communications over oceans too, e.g., for container ships, sail
| boats, planes, global surveillance, etc. The cross-satellite
| comms are not yet ready to essentially create a global mesh-
| net, but that's the plan.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Starlink doesn't support roaming between ground stations.
| Plus if you look at the oceans you can see there aren't any
| ground stations there anyways. So you wouldn't get internet
| out in the oceans even with Starlink. At least not in its
| current phase -- future releases, maybe?
|
| The reason there are satelites over the oceans is simply
| because they're not at a geo-stationary orbit. ie their orbit
| is faster than the rotation of the earth.
| rtkwe wrote:
| > Starlink doesn't support roaming between ground stations
|
| That's mostly a beta problem and Starlink is saying they
| plan to allow roaming eventually. From what I've seen it
| sounds like right now they only look for your dish in
| whatever cell it's registered to and don't do any discovery
| of dishes, it's all preprogrammed.
| bagels wrote:
| To be fair, some early pr and articles talked about
| satellite to satellite hops across oceans, even.though this
| is not a current capability.
| juancampa wrote:
| Those are _currently_ over the ocean but will eventually (after
| ~1.5h) orbit around to more useful areas.
|
| Satellites in low earth orbit need to move very quickly to stay
| up. If you want a satellite to stay over the same spot you'd
| need to put it way way above, in geostationary orbit[1], and
| get really bad latency.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
| _Microft wrote:
| 1.5 hours should be close to Starlink's orbital period which
| means that they will be back at the place the are currently
| at.
| juancampa wrote:
| Good point, I meant to say somewhere within that time
| period.
| stopnamingnuts wrote:
| I love watching these overhead in real time. For anyone not
| already familiar: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| That site is both beautiful and impressive, though for some
| reason it took over a minute for it to load in FF, almost
| instant in Chrome.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > though for some reason it took over a minute for it to load
| in FF
|
| That's a hard you problem.
|
| It loads in Firefox and is responsive in 1.13s on a system
| with an nVidia Quadro and 1.59s in a 4c/8gb VM with software
| rendering.
|
| * changed ms to s (herp derp)
|
| ** It took 1.76s to load in Chrome and 2.83s in Edge on the
| Quadro for me.
| gspr wrote:
| If you like this kind of thing, I recommend Stellarium. It's
| FOSS, runs locally, and has a gazillion features! You're also
| not limited to viewing from Earth :-)
| shagie wrote:
| Some other fun related tools and searches
|
| http://www.stuffin.space/?search=StarLink
|
| https://starlink.sx
|
| https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization (add "StarLink" to
| the search at the top - this one is particularly useful to get an
| idea of the orbits as you can speed it up to see what's going on)
| tshaddox wrote:
| I was camping in Yosemite earlier this year and happened to look
| up and see a line of these directly overhead. It was a bit funny
| being the only person in my group who knew about Starlink and
| thus the only person not perplexed or even a little freaked out
| by the sight.
| beamatronic wrote:
| You must live under a rock, to not know about Starlink by now.
| Don't people read the news on a regular basis to keep
| themselves educated?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't see any reason to expect people to have heard about
| it unless they follow tech business news. Or maybe astronomy.
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(page generated 2021-07-27 23:03 UTC)