[HN Gopher] Low Earth Orbit Visualization
___________________________________________________________________
Low Earth Orbit Visualization
Author : aseidl
Score : 404 points
Date : 2022-10-14 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (platform.leolabs.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (platform.leolabs.space)
| martinky24 wrote:
| Neat. I wonder if this is solely generated from their array of
| distrbuted sensors, or if this is just another visualization tool
| using space-track.org's data.
| scanny wrote:
| Im on my phone but you could probably look in the network
| requests panel of your browsers developer tools to see if any
| request is sent to space-track.org.
|
| Side note: does anyone know of a good tool / app for looking at
| things like that on iOS ?
| beardyw wrote:
| No network activity. Seems like it might update occasionally.
| beardyw wrote:
| It does.
| martinky24 wrote:
| space-track has pretty aggressive rate limiting, so they'd
| probably download the catalog to their servers once a day or
| so and work off of that.
| tullianus wrote:
| It doesn't appear to include any objects in the GEO belt (which
| space-track does), so I'd guess it's just objects from
| LEOlabs's own sensors.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Can someone fill me in quickly on what are "instruments"?
| detaro wrote:
| the radars collecting the information
| johnklos wrote:
| Scott Manley, unsurprisingly, did a nice video showing what it'd
| look like if you could see all the satellites and debris in space
| from the surface of Earth. It's scary how much stuff there is up
| there.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM
| fortysixdegrees wrote:
| What tech is powering this?
|
| Is it unity or Godot or something?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Amazing that each piece of debris is ID'd and tracked.
| MR4D wrote:
| The fact that I can view LEO objects in real-time on a phone just
| shows how awesome technology has become.
|
| Even 10 years ago, that thought would have been ludicrous.
| FpUser wrote:
| This is really nice made and shows how crowded the LEO space is
| outworlder wrote:
| Or _not_ crowded.
|
| We have more boats and planes than there are orbital objects.
| If you open flightradar you'll see an absolute abomination of
| planes flying overhead. Yet, unless you live close to an
| airport, you probably won't see any. The planet is really
| large. Space is larger still.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted. Space is really, really big
| (the name fits!). The biggest Earth-orbiting satellites are a
| bit less than the size of a school bus (the biggest being
| something like KH-9 size) in terms of mass, somewhat bigger
| when it comes to things like parabolic dishes.
|
| We worry about orbital debris because of the consequence of
| loss. There's a lot of room up there (not discounting
| everyone's concern).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The "Unknown" objects are literally UFOs
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| That crashed my browser HARD. Needed a full reboot. Thanks for
| that!
| sosodev wrote:
| Which browser are you using? WebGL2 should be perfectly safe.
| The tab crashed for me once but Firefox just reloaded it
| without a hitch.
| iwillbenice wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of objects being rendered on screen. My GPU
| (3090 Ti) was running at about 41% while I was playing with the
| site. Amazing site, but definitely GPU intensive.
| sosodev wrote:
| Do you have a high refresh rate monitor? I only hit ~35% GPU
| usage with 1660ti but my browser is synced to 60 FPS.
| iwillbenice wrote:
| It is 100Hz refresh rate - so 100fps I imagine.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| My GPU - an Intel 4600 integrated GPU in a 2014 laptop -
| kicked up to about 95% utilization while playing with the
| site. I suspect I was getting fewer details than you - mine
| was not silky smooth but still perfectly usable, at what I'd
| estimate to be about 20 FPS.
|
| That your powerful GPU was putting in some effort while my
| poky GPU [edit: and my 2018 low-end Android phone, admittedly
| at ~4FPS] are still able to render the scene at all indicates
| to me that they put in some impressive effort to make the
| graphics scale for different configurations!
| pb7 wrote:
| This Safari tab is at 65% GPU utilization on M1 MBP. Can't
| quite tell what frame rate but appears visually silky smooth
| so guessing 60+.
| Tepix wrote:
| Just curious ;-) Whom are you thanking in particular? The web
| page authors? The browser programmers? The OS programmers?
| Perhaps the graphics driver programmers? HN? The OP? The
| readers of your comment?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Whoever is at fault. They are just putting the thanks out
| there. It is not their fault that those responsible have not
| equipped themselves with the proper receivers.
|
| It's like a bad API. The docs say to send, but there's no
| mechanism to receive. It's not the fault of the user.
| niix wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but how in the hell do we get other things
| into space with all of this in way?
| mlindner wrote:
| The displayed size is over 1000 times larger than they actually
| are.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| The satellites are not to scale, most are very small.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| The space station, apogee altitude 422 km, relies heavily on
| photon torpedos.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| Is there a way to set the time to 'now'?
| greyhair wrote:
| Does anyone know what the altitude scaling is on this?
| geenew wrote:
| This made me look up a link to my old favourite for this kind of
| thing, CelesTrak.org . Unfortunately, they discontinued their
| visualizer due to licensing problems.
|
| For posterity, this was the tutorial:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC90GyHMabk
|
| The announcement is here:
| https://twitter.com/CelesTrak/status/1547264390650527744
|
| For now, the person behind it's got a (informative) error message
| showing up: https://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-viz.php
|
| He's asking for donations, might be worth it. It was a good tool.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| The ask comes from T.S. Kelso who is well regarded in the orbit
| tracking/space debris field. He's done a lot of important work
| making this information public and a lot of public good for
| collision avoidance. If it's important to you feel free to
| offer support! It's not clear to me he's asking for money,
| probably just help and time.
| baron816 wrote:
| These kinds of visualizations give you the impression that LEO is
| much more crowded than it actually is.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I feel like the "objects" aren't anywhere near being to scale.
| Pretty sure they should be MUCH MUCH smaller relative to the
| earth to be realistic.
| outworlder wrote:
| If they were, we wouldn't be able to see it in
| visualizations.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I mean, you need to actually be able to see the objects for
| it to be a visualization though. If the satellites were drawn
| to scale they'd be smaller than a pixel.
|
| I think you can get a decent sense of how crowded (or not) an
| area is by watching how many objects pass though it. The
| state that I live in looks like it has somewhere between 1
| and 10 satellites above it at any given time, which drives
| home the point that LEO isn't quite as "busy" as it feels
| from a zoomed-out, sped-up view of the map.
| pc86 wrote:
| There's another comment saying that the ISS to scale at the
| default zoom would be roughly 1/150th of a pixel. It stands
| to reason that every satellite here is much, much smaller
| than that.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Right, because apart from the moon, all objects orbiting the
| earth are considerably smaller than the New York Metropolitan
| Area which would not be your understanding if you took the
| visualization to be a scale representation.
| pbmango wrote:
| This looks extremely crowded - but reminds me of how apparently
| hard it was to find or bump into another ship crossing even a
| confined sea like the Med before sonar. With three dimensions
| here and more avoidance planning, even this level of space
| probably looks _very_ empty still.
| Tepix wrote:
| It is of course not to scale. You simply couldn't see any
| satellites unless looking at ridiculously small areas. Most of
| them measure a few meters at best.
| barbazoo wrote:
| This is fascinating. Can someone point me to resources that
| explain Starlink's seemingly (but obviously not) random
| trajectories as well as their positions (some in a line, some on
| individual trajectories).
| modeless wrote:
| The ones all in a line are recently launched. They are launched
| ~50 at a time into a low orbit and use thrusters to raise
| themselves up over the course of a few weeks or months. During
| that process they are all lined up in a row which slowly
| lengthens over time. As they reach operational altitude they
| separate into groups and each group spaces itself evenly around
| one orbit for even coverage.
|
| For more detail than you ever wanted, check here:
| https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
| Diederich wrote:
| I think this visualization makes it a little more clear what's
| going on with Starlink orbits: https://heavens-
| above.com/Starlink.aspx
| ubj wrote:
| Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are
| fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around
| the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated
| orbits?
|
| Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites
| at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing
| objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.
| kidme5 wrote:
| Looks familiar...(!)
|
| https://youtu.be/fEkXTV69yo4?t=22s
| kaboomerizer wrote:
| >> https://youtu.be/fEkXTV69yo4?t=22s
|
| Holy S$#! I didn't know about that.
|
| Are there links between this Space Force project and
| Starlink?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It just shows what an orbiting satellite constellation
| looks like and why so many are required. That is the
| similarity
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Actually SpaceX IS working on what that video shows:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilit
| ies
| mlindner wrote:
| How's this related?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It just shows what an orbiting satellite constellation
| looks like and why so many are required. That is the
| similarity
| mlindner wrote:
| > At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated
| orbits?
|
| It's not as easy to see as in this visualization, but Jonathan
| McDowell (https://twitter.com/planet4589) posts graphs on his
| website of each launch of starlink satellites as they raise
| orbits. https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html
|
| Scroll down to the individual launches and there's images you
| can click on of the orbit raising progress of each launch.
|
| Example of the Starlink 4-21 mission that launched on July 7th
| of this year: https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/spl51.jpg
| (One satellite failed, which isn't that unusual, and will de-
| orbit probably sometime early next year if they don't recover
| it.)
| mncharity wrote:
| And the adjacent graphs show phase (line growing longer,
| spreading along an orbit), and plane (line breaking into
| multiple lines slotting into nearby orbits). Positioning is
| accomplished by spending time at different-than-deployed
| altitudes, mostly lower. Lower gives a difference in nodal
| precession (Earth being non-spherical), IIRC something
| vaguely like half a degree/day difference out of several
| deg/day, slowly changing plane westward. Thus plane changes
| take weeks of drifting. Launch being far more about "go fast
| (in some direction)" than "while being high", rapid plane
| change (direction change) would have prohibitive "launch-
| like" energy cost. So a single launch will populate one or
| few nearby planes. And finally lower orbits orbit faster,
| quickly overtaking deployed sats in a single plane to reach
| deployment positions. Kerbal Space Program is thought a fun
| way to play with such.
| bagels wrote:
| They don't break up in to unrelated orbits. They simply spread
| out along the same orbit by varying the period for a few weeks.
| modeless wrote:
| For spotting satellites at night, try my site:
| https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/
|
| Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to
| see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough
| light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the
| ones that you can see with the unaided eye.
|
| There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright
| and can even be seen before sunset. The new Chinese space
| station Tiangong is also a good one to try. In the next few
| weeks it's expected that the recently launched BlueWalker-3
| will become quite bright too as it expands its enormous phased
| array antenna (64 square meters!). But the coolest is probably
| if you can catch a recently launched Starlink train, 50
| satellites all visible simultaneously or within seconds of each
| other. (A few weeks after launch the Starlink satellites are no
| longer visible as they reach their operational orbits.)
| ubj wrote:
| Very nice! Thanks for sharing this--looking forward to using
| your website!
| flavmartins wrote:
| Fantastic site!
| rmorey wrote:
| This is really well done, I will try it out tonight!
| prazgaitis wrote:
| This site is really cool, and I love your blog post
| explaining how it works. Hats off, fantastic work!
| jlpom wrote:
| Your website is very well designed, thanks
| 101008 wrote:
| Wow. I allowed Chrome to know my location for the first time
| and Street View was in my front door. I thought it was going
| to use the IP but it's impossible to be that accurate, does
| it Chrome use my Home on my profile location or something
| like that?
| netrus wrote:
| The Street View cars log information about wifi access
| points, and use wifi data from your device to guess your
| location.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| That'd explain the changes to Location Services on
| Android over the past several years.
| milosmns wrote:
| Is it related to Android though? I read somewhere/thought
| that it is primarily the Google Maps cars recording WiFi
| data and not phones). Europe wouldn't be covered at all
| if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)
|
| I mean, you can have a street full of iPhones - which I
| assume is a regular occurrence in USA, where people trust
| Apple - and still Google Maps on iPhone would guess well
| enough where you are. For example, I'm far away from the
| street and Google hasn't passed here recently, so my
| WiFi-based location is always way off (using Android). In
| my other home (and vacation home in another country) it's
| the opposite, because the cars have passed quite
| recently.
|
| The story checks out so far for me... but I am kinda lazy
| to search for the source on this right now, so pls share
| if you have it.
| modeless wrote:
| I believe this data mainly comes from phones, not street
| view cars. There are about a million times more phones
| out there than street view cars, and they all have GPS
| and Wifi. Apple had this feature long before Apple Maps
| was a thing, and they didn't license Street View data
| from Google.
| [deleted]
| Kucher wrote:
| I have used your site to successfully spot Starlink trains
| and the ISS several times. It's very well-designed and the
| included street view overlay especially helps with knowing
| where in the sky to look.
|
| Thank you!
| jgtrosh wrote:
| I can't tell if the times are for my timezone?
| modeless wrote:
| Times are displayed in the time zone your device's clock is
| set to. Unless you use the "Change Location" feature, in
| which case local time zone of the selected location will be
| used, with explicit time zone abbreviations shown.
| dwringer wrote:
| > At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated
| orbits?
|
| I can't speak with any authority, but in general a train of
| satellites would likely be moving in an orbit with either the
| apogee/perigee similar to the target orbits, but the other end
| of the orbit being higher or lower. Each time the train reaches
| the extremum at the target altitude, one of the satellites
| thrusts to adjust the other side of its orbit to target, which
| pushes it out of the pack.
|
| The specifics may be so different as to make that explanation
| totally wrong but it's probably not too far from the general
| principle.
| stvnbn wrote:
| Have you tried to look at the objects not placed by humans?
| daveslash wrote:
| Previous Comment Threads:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _LeoLabs: Low Earth Orbit Visualization_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413373 - May 2022 (3
| comments)
|
| _LeoLabs: low earth orbit visualization_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180865 - April 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Low Earth Orbit Visualization_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 - March 2021 (93
| comments)
|
| _Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct
| objects in LEO_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462
| - Oct 2020 (150 comments)
|
| _Low Earth Orbit Visualization_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165645 - Jan 2020 (1
| comment)
| social_quotient wrote:
| I wonder how much light is blocked by this stuff floating around?
| Seems like there are parallel efforts to make atmospheric dust
| while this is already up there.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Are the speed realtime? It seems they are really fast.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| I think if you set speed to 1, it's realtime.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| How is this built? Is this built on d3.js? This reminded me of
| old flash style plugins which we don't see any more.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| It's using Three.js[^1] with Photons[^2], and a number of other
| interesting libraries for calculation like satellite-js[^3].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/mkkellogg/Photons
|
| [3]: https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js
| sosodev wrote:
| I don't know which framework they're using, if any, but this is
| WebGL2. You can write fairly modern OpenGL code and run it in
| the browser. :)
| fidla wrote:
| Doesn't work in Brave
| ck2 wrote:
| We need "Space Roombas"(tm)
|
| Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies
| eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| Starlink follows the common solution of having them deorbit and
| burn up in the atmosphere at EOL. Competitors likely will do
| the same.
|
| Traffic management is an ongoing debate with the current
| solution simply being ground based tracking and orbit
| management.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Until your space roomba hits space debris going the opposite
| direction and becomes even more space debris
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How would that work? A rocket launches into orbit an unmanned
| satellite capable of autonomously intercepting the orbit of
| debris in order to collect it and then deorbit itself? Seems
| extremely expensive for little benefit.
|
| It's my understanding that atmospheric drag and orbital
| perturbations due to the gravity of other celestial bodies
| cause satellites to need station keeping maneuvers just to
| avoid crashing into the Earth. So it seems to me that this
| debris problem will eventually take care of itself.
| NickC25 wrote:
| That's really cool. I know this comment is low-effort, but I
| don't really care - this type of real-time visualization is
| really interesting and I want to see more of this sort of thing
| going forward.
|
| That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those
| possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is
| it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign
| intelligence operations?
| tullianus wrote:
| Often you can figure out what spacecraft/rocket a piece of
| debris came from with a good catalogue of orbits and some math
| - these are labeled "Debris." Often you just can't - these are
| labeled "Unknown."
|
| The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and
| they _occasionally_ will pretend one of their classified
| satellites doesn 't exist, but there's only a handful of these.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > but there's only a handful of these.
|
| Huge if true.
| tullianus wrote:
| Oh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified
| payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US
| satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space
| Force catalog.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I'd add that it would be pointless to try to hide a fair
| number of them, given that they approach the size of
| school buses (no joke -- the now-retired KH-9 was
| nicknamed "Big Bird" for good reason) and can be imaged
| on relatively consumer-ready optics. Some Russians made a
| nice stink a few years ago by using (IIRC) laser
| illumination to make some relatively high-res shots of
| American recce sats.
|
| The interesting aspects of them have to do with how far
| off-axis they can function. This was the major
| consequence of loss of the Morison leak of the KH-11
| shots of a Soviet carrier to Jane's Defense Weekly -- the
| image revealed how far off-axis it could image and some
| clues to how it processed imagery.
| bagels wrote:
| Often not in the public catalog though.
| maicro wrote:
| I only saw one blue dot while looking around (briefly on a
| laggy computer, so there are probably plenty of others):
| "L6188942", which you can isolate in the view by searching for
| it. https://www.n2yo.com/database/?id=81078#results shows there
| are no results for the "NORAD ID" for that same object.
|
| I don't have any domain knowledge here, so can't argue either
| way, but one possibility I can imagine is it's a place holder
| for "somebody launched something and we just don't have the
| records yet". No clue how realistic that is, and I'd trust my
| sibling comment's explanation more, but it wouldn't shock me if
| it takes time for info to propagate.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Enable Debris and be shocked.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Most of those debris dots however aren't labeled; I wonder if
| they are actual debris.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Try ground view with debris on.
|
| It looks like Asteroids after you've shot them into 10,000
| micro asteroids.
|
| Just needs a UFO going pew-pew...
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't really know what I'm looking at here, but it feels very
| sci-fi and I'm into it.
|
| I also wonder, how do they track so many objects? Who actually
| tracks them? How much does it cost (energy, engineers) to
| maintain the tracking systems?
|
| Edit: Are these all _simulated_ orbits? Is there a big "orbit
| registry" somewhere? And what are the "beams"?
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| The US Air Force, for one, is responsible for tracking
| everything it sees. That generally means computing TLAs for
| each object. Whether they release this info, I don't know.
| evilotto wrote:
| Space Force.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_Space_Defense_Squadron
| tullianus wrote:
| That capability was transferred to the Space Force recently.
| They make their data publicly available here:
| https://www.space-track.org/
| [deleted]
| tullianus wrote:
| LEOlabs operates its own radar systems that point upwards-ish.
| The "beams" you see are the fields of view of their radars.
| When an object crosses that field of view going at orbital
| speeds, LEOlabs tracks it and uses the partial trajectory
| information to figure out the orbit of the object. From there,
| it can potentially associate that object with existing objects
| in its own and other databases (the US Space Force, which
| operates its own radars, is one of the best-known).
|
| It then sells that information to spacecraft operators, who may
| be using the orbital information to determine if their
| spacecraft has a risk of hitting another object in space, or to
| figure out where their spacecraft are in the first place
| (usually when they're not talking to the ground).
| beardyw wrote:
| I am pretty certain they must be dead reckoning the location
| with occasional updates.
| mlindner wrote:
| That's how all space debris tracking works. Luckily orbits
| are rather predictable paths, but there's still atmospheric
| drag, lunar and solar gravity, non-uniform Earth gravity,
| solar photon pressure and measurement imprecision to deal
| with.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Is there a big orbit registry somewhere? Yes.
| https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/osoindex/search-ng.jspx Each
| individual object is observed every few weeks, and then they
| estimate its current position with math and physics.
|
| How do they track them? With big expensive radar systems,
| mostly paid for by the military. It's an international
| collaboration.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness#Systems
| mlindner wrote:
| LEOlabs operates and pays for their own radars. They're a
| commercial company.
| jcims wrote:
| If the earth is 750 pixels wide in the default zoom, each pixel
| is 10mi/16km. Scale image of the ISS would be roughly 1/150th of
| a pixel.
| jcwayne wrote:
| Thank you for this. While the visualization is
| useful/interesting, it frustrates me how often similar visuals
| are used in news stories about space junk. Yes, it's a problem,
| but using visuals like this without proper explanation
| misrepresents it terribly.
| jve wrote:
| Yes, and they don't add footnotes. From visualization it
| looks like crash is inevitable. But yeah, otherwise there
| would be no visualization.
|
| Think about it: they say 19334 objects are tracked. Imagine
| that many cars or trucks in the world scattered all across.
| Then extrude that to couple hundreds of kilometers. Would
| that feel congested to you? 19334 new cars are being
| manufactured in less than 2,5 hours...
| oittaa wrote:
| And that's before you add oceans and horizontal planes...
| bagels wrote:
| Those news stories would be a lot less interesting with a
| black picture of space with a footnote that the satellites
| are there, just too small to see.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I would love to see a visualization comparing orbital
| traffic/debris with marine traffic.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| With orbital junk visualizations, relative size isn't that
| important. What matters is collision probability. Low polar
| sun-synchronous orbits where the remote sensing stuff
| typically lives are super crowded, especially at the poles;
| in contrast, GSO is a well kept orbit with low relative
| velocities, and the dead stuff drifts away, so it's really
| safe.
| spacehunt wrote:
| I guess this is US only? The site is horribly broken upon
| loading. Only after using developer tools I discovered that all
| scripts and assets return 403 - CloudFront configured to block
| your country.
|
| Edit: I'm in Hong Kong.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Worked for me in the UK.
| hammock wrote:
| How do you launch a satellite without risking running into one of
| these things on the way up? Do you have to calculate the
| trajectories of all of them individually?
| iandanforth wrote:
| Yes. But luckily computers are fast and the spaces between each
| of those dots is (usually) pretty big.
| chroma wrote:
| Regarding launching and collisions: You mostly don't have to
| worry about it. The visualization makes space look crowded, but
| each satellite is over 150,000 times smaller than what is
| visualized. Space is very very big and very very empty. LEO is
| bigger than the surface of the earth and dozens of times
| thicker than the earth's crust.
|
| It only takes a few radar stations to track all the satellites,
| and the US Space Force makes their data public.[1][2] Most
| satellites don't have much in the way of maneuvering
| capabilities, so you don't need continuous tracking, just
| updates every few days or so.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
|
| 2. https://www.space-track.org/documentation#api
| doikor wrote:
| Yes they do know the trajectories so you put yours in a one
| where it should not hit anything. Most modern satellites also
| have engines so they can move on their orbit to dodge stuff if
| needed. Also remember that space is 3 dimensional so you can be
| at the same exact "spot" on this map but still be few
| kilometers apart.
|
| Also this visualization is kind of misleading as it makes the
| satellites look way too big. In reality you could not even see
| them from even from the closest zoom available.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Imagine if this was to scale and each of the satellites was a
| giant floating city the size of Tokyo or LA? I wonder how many
| centuries will pass before that becomes a reality.
|
| It's sort of interesting that there's been a wonky steam punk
| movie about battling cities roaming the Earth, gobbling each
| other up, but none about the more plausible future where there
| are battles between giant orbiting cities who pass their hated
| rivals once every certain number of years.
| rtanks wrote:
| This is truly fascinating.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| If you enter "1" for the visualization speed, is that the actual
| recorded velocities?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I've played kerbal space program for over 500 hours and I can
| confirm LEO looks like this in my game.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's impressive but is your processor alright? PS4 Pro nearly
| catches fire trying to simulate one modular space station.
|
| Do you know if there's been any news on KSP2? At this point I'm
| not sure it will ever happen.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-14 23:00 UTC)