51–60 of 195 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That capability was transferred to the Space Force recently. They make their data publicly available here: https://www.space-track.org/
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.
Huge if true.
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.
[1]: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
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.
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.
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.
That crashed my browser HARD. Needed a full reboot. Thanks for that!
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> but there's only a handful of these. Huge if true.
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.