That's a lot of junk orbiting earth.
Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
81–90 of 241 posts
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#82In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
Also here in Western Australia - as the SKA is a widely distributed radio array and sits here in the Murchison exclusion zone [1].
The hope is that all constellation satellite operators (not just Starlink) will adjust their reflective profile to reduce the visual spectrum noise pollution and honor an agreement to shut down all comms when passing over radio astronomy exclusion zones.
[1] https://www.industry.gov.au/science-technology-and-innovatio...
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The orbits are designed to maximize coverage; it's clearer if you look at the orbital parameters instead of a globe, where you can see that satellites are evenly spaced: https://imgur.com/a/aReh0EQ The details are complicated, but each satellite can see quite a large area and any given spot on the ground is within range of 3-4 satellites.
That's not what that chart shows. The satellites are not evenly spaced over the globe. Most of the satellites are in 53 degree inclination orbits: those orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude, and they have non-uniform coverage of smaller latitudes. (To see this, consider a constellation of 90 degree inclination polar orbits: the poles clearly have a higher density of satellites than the equato…
those orbits have zero coverage at greater than 53 degrees latitude
That's not actually true -- the horizon distance at those altitudes is several thousand km, and one degree of latitude is about 100km, so the satellites are actually visible quite far to the north of there. Of course, they'll be increasingly far away and close to the horizon, so not optimal for reception.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#84In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
Yet starlink is available where broadband sometimes isn't, so the insensible dreams seem to be coming from those who expect broadband to be deployed even in the most remote parts of the world (not necessarily talking about the place you mentioned, but I certainly wouldn't expect broadband in places like a remote cabin in the woods here in Quebec, or in a lake hunting station). Who cares if Elon is beyond this? I reme…
Why are you framing it as a hate Musk endeavour? So weird. It's pollute the sky because some people are on the hype train. The answer is already radio towers, they can be installed anywhere.
We have cheap fibre rolled out throughout South Africa, but now the Square Kilometre Array (which previously had complete radio silence) must deal with this nonsense flying overhead.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad news, it’s already over “your sky” because it’s how LEO works. > Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream You want to roll fiber through national forests and parks to serve a few rural people? How do you prefer the ocean faring population to get access?
Why does it have to go through the parks? And radio towers work just as well, it doesn't have to be a satellite hundreds of kilometres up in the sky. Ships already have access to internet through satellites already, there doesn't have to be even more EDIT. I meant why does the fibre have to through parks as a reason for having starlink
The constallations are spread for coverage and are in low earth orbits for signal strength, like sharks they have to stay in motion .. and many of the orbits are "precessing" .. they go about the earth and that great circle "ring" itself is turning - physics dictates that they go over all the surface sooner or later.
The SKA proposal is that comms constellation satellites switch themselves off (stop transmitting) when over the S.African and W.Australian SKA exclusion zones.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map. Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)
Space is not really 3d in the intuitive sense from a packing perspective, because satellites take up orbits rather than stationary points and orbits don't pack densely. It's more like an embedded 2d space, the intuition for that being that a ring, think Saturn's, is 2d and intersects any orbit.
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Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#87How come there are so many satellites all over the world but so little coverage? (I'm assuming the green hexagons it's the service coverage)
I believe the current implementation of the network requires the satellite to see both you and a ground station at the same time. So ground stations are the limiting factor.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. Space is definitely 3D and has 3D packing. Starlink is at about 550km. That has an orbital period of 1.5917hrs. Satellites are 7m (as suggested above, but this sounds large). So let's space the next group by 10km. Now the orbital period is 1.5952hrs. We have to go to 580km (+30km) to get to 1.6hrs, which is a difference of 37 seconds. So you got 60km (520km-580km) where you have an error rate of under 1% (0…
I'm not considering such concerns at all; my comment holds even considering perfect orbits followed by frictionless point objects of zero mass. You can of course pack into the height-dimension trivially when using circular orbits; the issue then is how many orbits you can pack into an orbital plane. I contend it scales with radius, not radius squared.
Also, it is kind of like an extreme version of the risks of flying cars. One hubcap/collision can mean catastrophic downstream effects.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#89In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
Bad news, it’s already over “your sky” because it’s how LEO works. > Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream You want to roll fiber through national forests and parks to serve a few rural people? How do you prefer the ocean faring population to get access?
> How do you prefer the ocean faring population to get access?
Just get one of those big rolls of fiber they use to lay undersea cables and let it unwind as you sail. Mmm, terabits per second!
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#90That's a lot of junk orbiting earth.
Those are functioning communication satellites, not yet junk. At the end of their (fairly short) planned lifetimes, they will use their maneuvering thrusters to de-orbit. And even if that fails, they're in a low enough orbit that they'll naturally fall out of the sky and burn up in the atmosphere about a decade after launch. Do you have any further objections?