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Low Earth Orbit Visualization
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#72Objects 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.
Yep, it looks much more dramatic than that is. A realistic scale would make objects invisible, unfortunately. So I can see why they make things bigger than they are.
The reason why there are so few incidents is that low earth orbit is simply a very large volume of space. It would be a mistake to think of it in 2D terms, it's a few hundred km in height and it has an area even at the lowest orbit that is larger than the surface of the earth. The total volume is orders of magnitudes larger than all our oceans combined.
So what's the chance of 2 out of a few hundred thousand things floating around in random orbits crashing into each other? It's not zero. But it's close enough to zero that it's very rare. But high enough that people worry about it somewhat. Obviously some orbits are quite congested and having a lot of debris scattering all over the place after a collision makes things worse. And the speeds at which things are moving around would cause some high energy collisions even for small objects.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#73Almost every single active satellite that I click is a Starlink satellite. Amazing how much SpaceX has gotten up there. And all those were launched on Falcon 9 rockets, with I think only two launch failures ever.
Three now, Starlink Group 9-3 launch failed in July last year. After the failure, the launch hold was cleared in 13 days, which has to be a record of some sort.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#74Just a reminder to everybody that we are competitively sprinting towards the brick wall of Kessler Syndrome by building out mega-constellations between about 600km and 1600km, sacrificing humanity's future in order to save a small amount of money right now using lower altitude orbits.
Even Starlink is arguably flying too high, but the attempt to compete with them at 1000km where satellites will be causing secondary and tertiary debris events for literally millennia, makes that look sensible.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#75This reminds me - I've been looking for an app, website or tool that can predict or visualize the location of any satellite up to a week out. Most softwares show only the intersection times of predicted orbits with fixed locations on earth, i.e. for telescope visibility.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#76The visualisation is cool. I've never seen the debris fields visualized before. They look like scars. Might be neat to see a viz including the geo synchronous and sun synchronous orbits. Should show up as seemingly dense, but far away.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scale distortion is very practical when differences are either miniscule or astronomical. A poster of our solar system where the sun and planets are at scale would look like a black piece of paper with a tiny white dot in the center.
"A poster of our solar system where the sun and planets are at scale would look like a black piece of paper with a tiny white dot in the center." Yes. And therefore a very valuable visualisation of reality. Visualisations at scale are nice and useful, too, but they are misleading if the actual sizes are never shown to the target audience.
From what I remember there are various different depictions for different purposes. Most are just showing order and what they look like visually so the precise scale is a detriment and skipped. Most of the solar system to scale things I've seen in person are multiple blocks long so the planets are a reasonable size, there's not really a reasonable way to print a to scale in both size and distance in a book.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#78The visualisation is cool. I've never seen the debris fields visualized before. They look like scars. Might be neat to see a viz including the geo synchronous and sun synchronous orbits. Should show up as seemingly dense, but far away.
Those large red blobs are not visualizations of debris fields. You can toggle them off as "instruments", and debris is actually toggled off by default.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#79Objects 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.
Do you think that some people look at this visualisation and leave with the impression that there are city sized satellites flying above them?
Yes. I once overheard a flat earther argue that spare reporting is fake because there are supposed to be tens of thousands of satellites, yet photos from the ISS don't show any of them.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before the Chinese A-Sat weapon tests, the #1 source of space junk was radioactive coolant leaking from old Soviet nuclear reactors in space (not RTGs, literally nuclear reactors)
This is true! Had no idea! "The Soviet Union has been flying nuclear power sources in space since about 1965. For the most part these nuclear power sources have been low-power nuclear reactors using a thermoelectric conversion principle." https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900051140
The thing 'rebelgecko is alluding to is specific, and fascinating! The coolant in these space reactors is a molten metal (low-melting point sodium-potassium eutectic). When they leaked in the space vacuum, the liquid dispersed into a large number of small, metal spherules, which formed rings around Earth. Because the spherules are metallic and smooth, they're (comparatively) easy to track by radar, from Earth.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... (pdf) ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status")