Nice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.
Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#52Just 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.
Yes but the errors would be uncorrelated and if you could use many different measurements you should be able to estimate with reasonable certainty.
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes but the errors would be uncorrelated and if you could use many different measurements you should be able to estimate with reasonable certainty.
Given the large R (Even starlink satellites are far away compared to positional accuracy needed) and probably pretty large angular error, your still talking error of kilometres, though with good optics you may be able to get this down to hundreds of meters. The other problem is knowing the position isn't trivial, since their position drifts relative to predicted and isn't known very precisely.
There is also the problem that as R shrinks, speed increases relative to you.
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#54To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#55Funny the location of the ground stations. Very odd clustering.
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#56Use starlink.sx instead
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#57Earlier 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?
Weight, Cost, bandwidth, polar availablity.
In Guam it means 10Gbps without Fiber.
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#58Earlier 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.
In the last ten years we have one (1) accidental satellite collision. In 2021 when a Chinese spy satellite in a 788km orbit collided with an old rocket stage from the 90s. There was also that Indian anti-satellite weapon hitting a microsat in 2019, but that was very much intentional (and much condemned because of all the fragments it caused)
In the decade before that (so 2006-2015) we had four accidental collisions and two anti-satellite tests (China and US)
Those are not frequent events. And if you attribute any statistical significance to them, it seems we are getting much better at avoiding collisions
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#59I always like looking at this one https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
Re: Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
#60I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.