But how do they beam copies of the space to space links down for wiretapping, as Iridium does?
Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
121–130 of 469 posts
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#122Don’t you mean 42million Gigabytes?
Isn’t that equivalent? What does it help to use GB instead of PB?
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, they look like little white dots moving across the sky. Brightness can change as they move too. It'll start off bright and then as it goes away it eventually disappears entirely. Since I usually sit in the same position in the hot tub, I've come to notice that I usually see one of them cross a pretty specific path from north to south, so I've gotten used to looking in that part of the sky as I'm sitting there.…
I guess they disappear as they approach the horizon because the light is spread/absorbed too much by going through more atmosphere?
My impression was that you can only see them as they reflect sunlight in your direction. As the angle formed between you, the satellite and the sun changes, you will first not see the satellite, then see, then not see it again.
And of course, if it is 3am, and there is no sunlight at any altitude because the sun is on the other side of the world, no satellites are visible.
I could be wrong.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you took a petabyte's worth of 1GB flash drives and lined them up end to end, they would stretch over 92 football fields. https://info.cobaltiron.com/blog/petabyte-how-much-informati...
That's actually a somewhat useful visual.
Not really unless you're using 1 GB flash drives from fifteen years ago. 256 GB is now common, which would make that petabyte less than 1 football field. (It's only 4096 such drives.)
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they disappear as they approach the horizon because the light is spread/absorbed too much by going through more atmosphere?
I actually see them disappear long before they get to the horizon. My guess is just less reflected light on whatever is shiny on the satellite.
that and/or entering the Earth penumbra.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#126I sit in my hot tub at night and see 1-2+ satellites go over every single time I'm out there. Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.
How do you spot a satellite? I've never seen one.
The easiest satellite to see is the ISS. NASA provides times when it can be seen from any given place. I subscribe to the SpotTheStation mailing list.
In general, you can see a satellite when it is overhead and illuminated by the sun. In the evening, it will appear in the west, moving towards the east ( almost all satellites go this way, not just ISS ). As it goes farther east, heading towards darkness, it will fade away. The ISS is bright enough to see a reddish tinge as it passes through sunset light.
Shooting stars go much faster than satellites.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#127If I send one byte and it hops through ten satellites, is SpaceX counting that as ten bytes of data?
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#128I sit in my hot tub at night and see 1-2+ satellites go over every single time I'm out there. Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up.
How do you spot a satellite? I've never seen one.
https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ Put in your location and it will tell you when and where to look at the sky to see one. Works great for me and hopefully it will work for you.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#129So which points are getting “faster than fibre” latency because of this? Extra distance up and down, but make up for it on the long-haul. Won’t beat HF radio though.
Starlink adds a latency penalty of tens of milliseconds going through the atmosphere. Each round trip is four hops through the clouds. I expect most of this delay is forward error correction, combined with lower bandwidth of the radios.
On top of that, you may have queuing in each satellite.
Finally, the satellite laser links aren’t pointing exactly in the direction you want to your packets to travel. They’re at some diagonal, and the packets need to tack back and forth, which wastes distance. Think the streets of Manhattan.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a serious question? You think SpaceX developed the industry-leading orbital rocket, launched hundreds of times to deliver thousands of in-house developed satellites utilizing homegrown, novel argon gas ion thrusters, to develop a global satellite internet system using inter-satellite laser links, their own in-house developed, incredibly inexpensive phased array antenna system, and everything else, and they fo…
"industry-leading" [citation needed]
Who else would be industry leading if not for SpaceX? Genuinely asking, I don't get how a source would be even possible for this. Do you mean in terms of launch? Satellites in orbit? Because they are leading both of those by far