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Low Earth Orbit Visualization

platform.leolabs.space

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Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#21

Post by Diederich »

barbazoo wrote: post #13

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).

I think this visualization makes it a little more clear what's going on with Starlink orbits: https://heavens-above.com/Starlink.aspx

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#23

Post by Tepix »

pbmango wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#24

Post by Tepix »

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #7

That crashed my browser HARD. Needed a full reboot. Thanks for that!

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?

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#26

Post by tullianus »

NickC25 wrote: post #17

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?

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#28

Post by ubj »

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#29

Post by maicro »

NickC25 wrote: post #17

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?

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.

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