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Low Earth Orbit Visualization

platform.leolabs.space

31–40 of 195 posts

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#31
post #28

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.

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.)

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#33
post #24

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?

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#34
post #2

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"?

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

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#35
post #2

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"?

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#37
post #32

We need "Space Roombas"™ Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?

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.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#38
post #2

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"?

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.

Space Force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_Space_Defense_Squadron

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#40

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

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.

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!

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