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Starlink satellites are in low enough orbit to decay on very short timescales. More worrisome are Russian satellites in high / very long lived orbits that tend to spontaneously explode.
Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.
“any accurate depiction of elevation would be indistinguishable from a flat map at that scale. The coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 4½ miles above sea level, so in a 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1–2 pixel height for Mt Whitney which is the highest point in the contiguous United States.”
and also
“the difference in elevation between Everest and the Marianas Trench is less than the bulging of the earth from its rotation. And that amount is less than you might guess. If we scale the earth down to a diameter of one foot (which would be bigger than my childhood globe), the bulge would be 0.04in or roughly 1mm. Good luck distinguishing your oblate spheroid from a sphere with those numbers.”
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Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.
Proper scale makes the visualization impractical. I wrote about this with respect to a US map showing mountains on my mailing list: https://dahosek.substack.com/p/one-million-stories “any accurate depiction of elevation would be indistinguishable from a flat map at that scale. The coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 4½ miles abov…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starlink satellites are in low enough orbit to decay on very short timescales. More worrisome are Russian satellites in high / very long lived orbits that tend to spontaneously explode.
Is "spontaneously explode" supposed to be a joke about how Russia will use them as bombs, or are they actually poorly designed?
https://spacenews.com/low-intensity-explosion-caused-russian...
If you're a satellite operator looking to avoid conjunctions, then buying additional measurements helps reduce uncertainty (which is often needed in order to decide if you should conduct a maneuver).
Nice to see United Kingdom using a predictable trajectory. Dismayed by so many other nations just crapping all over the planet without consideration though. The lack of foresight is frustrating.
This is great! Is there a way to set the visualization to the present moment and real-time?