Every single satellite orbiting Earth, in a single image

The image certainly shows there are a lot of satellites floating around Earth. But "crowded" is a relative term. There are many, many miles of space between those satellites.

Re: Every single satellite orbiting Earth, in a single image

#8

Post by jessriedel » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:15 AM UTC

aasarava wrote: post #7

My first thought was wow! My second thought was, wait a minute... The image certainly shows there are a lot of satellites floating around Earth. But "crowded" is a relative term. There are many, many miles of space between those satellites.

Yep. I did a back of the envelope calculation once, and I think it was something like a thousand cubic miles for every satellite in low Earth orbit.

Alaska would look overwhelmingly crowded too if you drew even a tiny fraction of the population as small visible people on the map.

Re: Every single satellite orbiting Earth, in a single image

#9

Post by turnip1979 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:17 AM UTC

seanfisher wrote: post #2

Totally to scale, right. Satellites are the size of countries now.

I am going to say the same thing in a different way:

"The satellites in the image are not to scale, and this makes the image misleading."

Was that so hard?

Re: Every single satellite orbiting Earth, in a single image

#10

Post by rurounijones » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:18 AM UTC

Didn't realise we have put that many satellites into orbit.

If you had asked me out of the blue how many sats humans had launched I would have guessed a couple of hundred.