Amazing that each piece of debris is ID'd and tracked.
Low Earth Orbit Visualization
121–130 of 195 posts
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#122The "Unknown" objects are literally UFOs
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#123Those 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.
Have you tried to look at the objects not placed by humans?
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#124Scott 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
Not really. Even low Earth orbit is absolutely gigantic. It’s considerably larger than the surface of the Earth after all. Scott Manley has the same issue that this website: for things to be seen, you need to magnify them extremely.
Each dot here represents things at most meters large. Most are centimetres large especially if you look at debris. Yet each dot is the size of a large urban area on Earth. Do the same thing with planes or boats and the Earth will be close to painted a solid colour.
Obviously, to size, you would see nothing from this distance which would be a lot less impressive, a lot less useful but a lot less scary.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#125If 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.
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.
It would be nice to have a selector for the scale level of the satellites, perhaps x1000, x100, x10 and x1.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#126Scott 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
Note that you have an option for a "Ground view" in TFA which lets you get a similar view, but real time and interactive.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#127Those 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…
Thanks for your site! I used it with my kids during COVID lockdown to watch the ISS and other satellites. It’s great
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#128Scott 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
Not really. Even low Earth orbit is absolutely gigantic. It’s considerably larger than the surface of the Earth after all. Scott Manley has the same issue that this website: for things to be seen, you need to magnify them extremely. Each dot here represents things at most meters large. Most are centimetres large especially if you look at debris. Yet each dot is the size of a large urban area on Earth. Do the same thi…
>Obviously, to size would be less scary.
I was expecting this, since it's probably the most common criticism of this type of visualization.
Problem is, that analysis only looks at half the dataviz fidelity coin. It recognizes the (unavoidable) loss of fidelity in size, but it ignores the (also unavoidable) loss of fidelity in time.
In the real world these objects do not remain orbiting Earth for a few minutes (ie the interval you're likely to look at this visualization). Instead, objects above ~800 km remain in Earth orbit for hundreds to thousands of years.[1]
Mathematically this second inaccuracy tends to cancel out the first inaccuracy, therefore (presumably) making this "a lot more scary/impressive."
Strangely I always see the criticism about size, but I never see the countervailing criticism about time. I suppose it's just like you said: the size factor is "obvious", but the time factor much less so.
Eta: For some great visualizations of the space debris problem, I can heartily recommend this (slightly older) ESA video.[2] It's basically a full-length documentary crammed into 15 minutes.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#129How is this built? Is this built on d3.js? This reminded me of old flash style plugins which we don't see any more.
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
This ux/navigation implementation is inspiring esp for mobile safari web browser. Intuitive and responsive, kudos to the devs
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#130Damn that's impressive. Its hard to imagine being up that high