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Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

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Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#31

Post by ruszki »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #30
ruszki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge advantages maybe in the future. Not now. I’m thinking buying a camper van, and just travel through the world. Except I need internet, everywhere. There are no such options. Starlink is the best, but there are two main problems with it: - In the countries where it would be the most useful, it’s not allowed to be used (Garmin has the same problem with their Fenix 8 Pro, their availability maps are a joke) - You ne…

There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.

What does it give to the military, what they haven’t had already? Better round trip time?

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#33

Post by gspr »

kklisura wrote: post #29

Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...

Sure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites.

This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#35

Post by lnenad »

krige wrote: post #26
iknowstuff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of space in space. This is not to scale.

There's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.

Surface of a sphere (spheroid) is the square of the diameter. Planes fly at ~10kms, satellites at orders of magnitude higher.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#36

Post by csomar »

krige wrote: post #26
iknowstuff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of space in space. This is not to scale.

There's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.

We have very few midair collisions every year and they almost all happen near the airports.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#37

Post by pgalvin »

lnenad wrote: post #35
krige wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.

Surface of a sphere (spheroid) is the square of the diameter. Planes fly at ~10kms, satellites at orders of magnitude higher.

However, the Earth’s own radius dwarfs the height of LEO, so they’re actually roughly the same.

There are other reasons we don’t currently experience major problems with collisions in space, and why airplanes sometimes do, but it is not this.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#38

Post by zipy124 »

kklisura wrote: post #29

Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...

Not an expert but I imagine the problem with using vision is the problem of angular error propagation. That is the angle-> distance error problem:

linear error≈Rtan(Δθ)≈RΔθ

Here linear error is the error in position, R is the distance from the observer to the target and θ is the angle error. You would need incredibly good optics and resolution to minimise angular error and thus linear error.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#39

Post by pgalvin »

ruszki wrote: post #31
spacebanana7 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.

What does it give to the military, what they haven’t had already? Better round trip time?

I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:

- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,

- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),

- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.

Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.

Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

#40

Post by lnenad »

pgalvin wrote: post #37
lnenad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surface of a sphere (spheroid) is the square of the diameter. Planes fly at ~10kms, satellites at orders of magnitude higher.

However, the Earth’s own radius dwarfs the height of LEO, so they’re actually roughly the same. There are other reasons we don’t currently experience major problems with collisions in space, and why airplanes sometimes do, but it is not this.

Respectfully disagree as you're comparing the surface to the size of the object, so it definitely matters.

Here's some math:

Average Earth diameter: 12742kms + 10km Average airplane surface area = 500m2 12752^2*pi = 510,865,389km2 Surface flight/plane = 1021730 planes

Starlink orbit height = ~500km Surface at orbit = ~551,712,377 so ~8% increase (which is non-negligible) Average Starlink satellite surface area = ~7m2 Surface LEO/satelite = 78816053 satellites (77x compared to airplanes)

Daily flights 50k-100k. Total number of satellites And this is only for Starlink LEO. If you go for higher orbits the surface grows substantially. Also satellites have predictable paths, altitudes, airplanes maneuver and turn, gain altitude/lose altitude. They gather around points (airfields) etc...

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