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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
141–150 of 469 posts
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which also makes me wonder how many of the shooting stars I've seen recently are just old starlinks burning up. Probably close to none. The lifetime of the satellites is about 5 years give or take. According to this page [1], a total of 355 satellites have deorbited over the past roughly 5 years. That's an average of about 71 per year or about one every 5 days. Since planned disposals are done over uninhabited area…
If someone makes a mistake and the satellite deorbits in the wrong place, am I likely to be impaled by a satellite screw or something travelling at terminal velocity?
China is still working on those reusable rockets...
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you spot a satellite? I've never seen one.
It depends where you live certainly - if you live close to a big city you will probably never see them. But there are places - like New Zealand - where you can see them fairly often. There are some online trackers you can use.
I live 10 miles from Boston and I've seen them a whole bunch. I've used https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah. With Starlink satellites, you need a lot of luck with the conditions to see them. I've seen them a handful of times and I'm in a relatively dark sky location.
ISS is often visible in the middle of the day even in bright midday Southwest sun, if you know where & when to look.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#145[flagged]
I'm immensely interested in people commenting how they are disinterested in X thing.
Please go on! I'd love to know the motivation of posting, it makes no sense to me.
Seems to be a self-fulfilled prophecy.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
You can buy a 1TB microSD card for $150 now.
What a time to be alive! Even those of us without a football field can lay out huge amounts of data in a straight line.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#147Random thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second?
I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds still tiny?
Not that it would be a big deal if it happened, just curiosity.
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#148[dead]
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#149Earlier 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.…
Just throwing this out there, but has anyone else seen 'formations' of satellites? I've only seen them once but there were about 5 to 10 (it was a while ago) of what I'm assuming are satellites moving in a line formation at high speeds across the night sky. They're too distant and too fast to be planes so I'm assuming they are some sort of military formation of satellites?
> They're too distant
I don’t know how you would know that. People are very bad at seeing distances at these scales.
If they were indeed satelites they could be starlink satelites. They are put into orbit as a bunch together and then they spread along their orbital path as they take up their position.
This article has a picture, maybe you can check if it is similar to what you have seen? https://earthsky.org/space/spacex-starlink-satellites-explai...
If you could recall more details then maybe we can figure out more exactly what this might have been. (Such as where you were, which direction you were looking at, when did this happen, how fast did they cross the sky and how far the dots were from each other. Were the line spread in the direction they were moving or sideways?)
Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
#150Random thought I just had: What are the odds of a rocket launch crossing through one of these laser links on its way to a higher orbit and disrupting traffic for a fraction of a second? I know space is really big and so the odds of a rocket hitting a satellite on its way up are incredibly low, but now we're talking about lots of lines between each satellite rather than just the satellites themselves. Are the odds sti…
I think they are still tiny. Also don't networking systems routinely deal with temporary link disruption?