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Low Earth Orbit Visualization
- jcims 4y agoIf the earth is 750 pixels wide in the default zoom, each pixel is 10mi/16km. Scale image of the ISS would be roughly 1/150th of a pixel.
- jcwayne 4y agoThank you for this. While the visualization is useful/interesting, it frustrates me how often similar visuals are used in news stories about space junk. Yes, it's a problem, but using visuals like this without proper explanation misrepresents it terribly.
- jve 4y agoYes, and they don't add footnotes. From visualization it looks like crash is inevitable. But yeah, otherwise there would be no visualization. Think about it: they say 19334 objects are tracked. Imagine that many cars or trucks in the world scattered all across. Then extrude that to couple hundreds of kilometers. Would that feel congested to you? 19334 new cars are being manufactured in less than 2,5 hours...
- oittaa 4y agoAnd that's before you add oceans and horizontal planes...
- rootusrootus 4y agoWe do love car analogies. I adore them myself. But you did forget one thing. On the surface, a typical car is averaging something like 35 mph. A low earth orbit satellite around 7.8 kilometers per second. I otherwise totally agree with your point.
- bagels 4y agoThose news stories would be a lot less interesting with a black picture of space with a footnote that the satellites are there, just too small to see.
- orbital-decay 4y agoWith orbital junk visualizations, relative size isn't that important. What matters is collision probability. Low polar sun-synchronous orbits where the remote sensing stuff typically lives are super crowded, especially at the poles; in contrast, GSO is a well kept orbit with low relative velocities, and the dead stuff drifts away, so it's really safe.
- ortusdux 4y agoI would love to see a visualization comparing orbital traffic/debris with marine traffic.
- gus_massa 4y agoIt would be nice to have a selector for the scale level of the satellites, perhaps x1000, x100, x10 and x1.
- yazzku 4y agoAnd perhaps a density map too.
- killjoywashere 4y agoThey provide conjunctions as well. This is actually funded by DoD, they're not messing around.
- qubex 4y agoI always try to explain it thusly: “up there” is “bigger” than “down here” because the radius is greater and there’s three-dimensional separation, and nobody “down here” is worried a few hundred thousand or even several hundred million busses might collide, so why worry about it “up there”?
- spacehunt 4y agoI guess this is US only? The site is horribly broken upon loading. Only after using developer tools I discovered that all scripts and assets return 403 - CloudFront configured to block your country. Edit: I'm in Hong Kong.
- secondcoming 4y agoWorked for me in the UK.
- fortysixdegrees 4y agoWhat tech is powering this? Is it unity or Godot or something?
- spaceman33 4y agoWebgl via Three.js
- social_quotient 4y agoI wonder how much light is blocked by this stuff floating around? Seems like there are parallel efforts to make atmospheric dust while this is already up there.
- spaceman33 4y agoThe satellites are drawn much larger than real life. It's negligible.
- uwagar 4y agowhat do the flat earthers think about this?
- nerdponx 4y agoI don't really know what I'm looking at here, but it feels very sci-fi and I'm into it. I also wonder, how do they track so many objects? Who actually tracks them? How much does it cost (energy, engineers) to maintain the tracking systems? Edit: Are these all simulated orbits? Is there a big "orbit registry" somewhere? And what are the "beams"?
- tullianus 4y agoLEOlabs operates its own radar systems that point upwards-ish. The "beams" you see are the fields of view of their radars. When an object crosses that field of view going at orbital speeds, LEOlabs tracks it and uses the partial trajectory information to figure out the orbit of the object. From there, it can potentially associate that object with existing objects in its own and other databases (the US Space Force, which operates its own radars, is one of the best-known). It then sells that information to spacecraft operators, who may be using the orbital information to determine if their spacecraft has a risk of hitting another object in space, or to figure out where their spacecraft are in the first place (usually when they're not talking to the ground).
- beardyw 4y agoI am pretty certain they must be dead reckoning the location with occasional updates.
- mlindner 4y agoThat's how all space debris tracking works. Luckily orbits are rather predictable paths, but there's still atmospheric drag, lunar and solar gravity, non-uniform Earth gravity, solar photon pressure and measurement imprecision to deal with.
- ahazred8ta 4y agoIs there a big orbit registry somewhere? Yes. https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/osoindex/search-ng.jspx https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/osoindex/search-ng.jspx Each individual object is observed every few weeks, and then they estimate its current position with math and physics. How do they track them? With big expensive radar systems, mostly paid for by the military. It's an international collaboration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness#Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness#Systems
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI’ve played kerbal space program for over 500 hours and I can confirm LEO looks like this in my game.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThat's impressive but is your processor alright? PS4 Pro nearly catches fire trying to simulate one modular space station. Do you know if there's been any news on KSP2? At this point I'm not sure it will ever happen.
- martinky24 4y agoNeat. I wonder if this is solely generated from their array of distrbuted sensors, or if this is just another visualization tool using space-track.org's data.
- scanny 4y agoIm on my phone but you could probably look in the network requests panel of your browsers developer tools to see if any request is sent to space-track.org. Side note: does anyone know of a good tool / app for looking at things like that on iOS ?
- beardyw 4y agoNo network activity. Seems like it might update occasionally.
- beardyw 4y agoIt does.
- martinky24 4y agospace-track has pretty aggressive rate limiting, so they'd probably download the catalog to their servers once a day or so and work off of that.
- tullianus 4y agoIt doesn't appear to include any objects in the GEO belt (which space-track does), so I'd guess it's just objects from LEOlabs's own sensors.
- MR4D 4y agoThe fact that I can view LEO objects in real-time on a phone just shows how awesome technology has become. Even 10 years ago, that thought would have been ludicrous.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rickreynoldssf 4y agoThat crashed my browser HARD. Needed a full reboot. Thanks for that!
- Tepix 4y agoJust curious ;-) Whom are you thanking in particular? The web page authors? The browser programmers? The OS programmers? Perhaps the graphics driver programmers? HN? The OP? The readers of your comment?
- dylan604 4y agoWhoever is at fault. They are just putting the thanks out there. It is not their fault that those responsible have not equipped themselves with the proper receivers. It's like a bad API. The docs say to send, but there's no mechanism to receive. It's not the fault of the user.
- iwillbenice 4y agoYeah, there's a lot of objects being rendered on screen. My GPU (3090 Ti) was running at about 41% while I was playing with the site. Amazing site, but definitely GPU intensive.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoMy GPU - an Intel 4600 integrated GPU in a 2014 laptop - kicked up to about 95% utilization while playing with the site. I suspect I was getting fewer details than you - mine was not silky smooth but still perfectly usable, at what I'd estimate to be about 20 FPS. That your powerful GPU was putting in some effort while my poky GPU [edit: and my 2018 low-end Android phone, admittedly at ~4FPS] are still able to render the scene at all indicates to me that they put in some impressive effort to make the graphics scale for different configurations!
- pb7 4y agoThis Safari tab is at 65% GPU utilization on M1 MBP. Can't quite tell what frame rate but appears visually silky smooth so guessing 60+.
- baron816 4y agoThese kinds of visualizations give you the impression that LEO is much more crowded than it actually is.
- dasil003 4y agoRight, because apart from the moon, all objects orbiting the earth are considerably smaller than the New York Metropolitan Area which would not be your understanding if you took the visualization to be a scale representation.
- itslennysfault 4y agoI feel like the "objects" aren't anywhere near being to scale. Pretty sure they should be MUCH MUCH smaller relative to the earth to be realistic.
- outworlder 4y agoIf they were, we wouldn't be able to see it in visualizations.
- lastofthemojito 4y agoI mean, you need to actually be able to see the objects for it to be a visualization though. If the satellites were drawn to scale they'd be smaller than a pixel. I think you can get a decent sense of how crowded (or not) an area is by watching how many objects pass though it. The state that I live in looks like it has somewhere between 1 and 10 satellites above it at any given time, which drives home the point that LEO isn't quite as "busy" as it feels from a zoomed-out, sped-up view of the map.
- pc86 4y agoThere's another comment saying that the ISS to scale at the default zoom would be roughly 1/150th of a pixel. It stands to reason that every satellite here is much, much smaller than that.
- pbmango 4y agoThis looks extremely crowded - but reminds me of how apparently hard it was to find or bump into another ship crossing even a confined sea like the Med before sonar. With three dimensions here and more avoidance planning, even this level of space probably looks very empty still.
- Tepix 4y agoIt is of course not to scale. You simply couldn't see any satellites unless looking at ridiculously small areas. Most of them measure a few meters at best.
- barbazoo 4y agoThis is fascinating. Can someone point me to resources that explain Starlink's seemingly (but obviously not) random trajectories as well as their positions (some in a line, some on individual trajectories).
- modeless 4y agoThe ones all in a line are recently launched. They are launched ~50 at a time into a low orbit and use thrusters to raise themselves up over the course of a few weeks or months. During that process they are all lined up in a row which slowly lengthens over time. As they reach operational altitude they separate into groups and each group spaces itself evenly around one orbit for even coverage. For more detail than you ever wanted, check here: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f501 https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
- Diederich 4y agoI think this visualization makes it a little more clear what's going on with Starlink orbits: https://heavens-above.com/Starlink.aspx https://heavens-above.com/Starlink.aspx
- daveslash 4y agoPrevious Comment Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: LeoLabs: Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413373 - May 2022 (3 comments) LeoLabs: low earth orbit visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180865 - April 2022 (1 comment) Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 - March 2021 (93 comments) Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct objects in LEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 - Oct 2020 (150 comments) Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165645 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
- NickC25 4y agoThat's really cool. I know this comment is low-effort, but I don't really care - this type of real-time visualization is really interesting and I want to see more of this sort of thing going forward. That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?
- tullianus 4y agoOften you can figure out what spacecraft/rocket a piece of debris came from with a good catalogue of orbits and some math - these are labeled "Debris." Often you just can't - these are labeled "Unknown." The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and they occasionally will pretend one of their classified satellites doesn't exist, but there's only a handful of these.
- 3pt14159 4y ago> but there's only a handful of these. Huge if true.
- tullianus 4y agoOh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space Force catalog.
- bagels 4y agoOften not in the public catalog though.
- aerostable_slug 4y agoI'd add that it would be pointless to try to hide a fair number of them, given that they approach the size of school buses (no joke — the now-retired KH-9 was nicknamed "Big Bird" for good reason) and can be imaged on relatively consumer-ready optics. Some Russians made a nice stink a few years ago by using (IIRC) laser illumination to make some relatively high-res shots of American recce sats. The interesting aspects of them have to do with how far off-axis they can function. This was the major consequence of loss of the Morison leak of the KH-11 shots of a Soviet carrier to Jane's Defense Weekly — the image revealed how far off-axis it could image and some clues to how it processed imagery.
- FpUser 4y agoThis is really nice made and shows how crowded the LEO space is
- outworlder 4y agoOr _not_ crowded. We have more boats and planes than there are orbital objects. If you open flightradar you'll see an absolute abomination of planes flying overhead. Yet, unless you live close to an airport, you probably won't see any. The planet is really large. Space is larger still.
- aerostable_slug 4y agoNot sure why this is downvoted. Space is really, really big (the name fits!). The biggest Earth-orbiting satellites are a bit less than the size of a school bus (the biggest being something like KH-9 size) in terms of mass, somewhat bigger when it comes to things like parabolic dishes. We worry about orbital debris because of the consequence of loss. There's a lot of room up there (not discounting everyone's concern).
- possiblydrunk 4y agoIs there a way to set the time to 'now'?
- ubj 4y agoThose long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits? Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.
- modeless 4y agoFor spotting satellites at night, try my site: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the ones that you can see with the unaided eye. There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright and can even be seen before sunset. The new Chinese space station Tiangong is also a good one to try. In the next few weeks it's expected that the recently launched BlueWalker-3 will become quite bright too as it expands its enormous phased array antenna (64 square meters!). But the coolest is probably if you can catch a recently launched Starlink train, 50 satellites all visible simultaneously or within seconds of each other. (A few weeks after launch the Starlink satellites are no longer visible as they reach their operational orbits.)
- Kucher 4y agoI have used your site to successfully spot Starlink trains and the ISS several times. It's very well-designed and the included street view overlay especially helps with knowing where in the sky to look. Thank you!
- ubj 4y agoVery nice! Thanks for sharing this--looking forward to using your website!
- 101008 4y agoWow. I allowed Chrome to know my location for the first time and Street View was in my front door. I thought it was going to use the IP but it's impossible to be that accurate, does it Chrome use my Home on my profile location or something like that?
- ck2 4y agoWe need "Space Roombas"™ Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?
- merely-unlikely 4y agoStarlink follows the common solution of having them deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere at EOL. Competitors likely will do the same. Traffic management is an ongoing debate with the current solution simply being ground based tracking and orbit management.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoUntil your space roomba hits space debris going the opposite direction and becomes even more space debris
- matheusmoreira 4y agoHow would that work? A rocket launches into orbit an unmanned satellite capable of autonomously intercepting the orbit of debris in order to collect it and then deorbit itself? Seems extremely expensive for little benefit. It's my understanding that atmospheric drag and orbital perturbations due to the gravity of other celestial bodies cause satellites to need station keeping maneuvers just to avoid crashing into the Earth. So it seems to me that this debris problem will eventually take care of itself.
- simlevesque 4y agoCan someone fill me in quickly on what are "instruments"?
- detaro 4y agothe radars collecting the information
- geenew 4y agoThis made me look up a link to my old favourite for this kind of thing, CelesTrak.org . Unfortunately, they discontinued their visualizer due to licensing problems. For posterity, this was the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC90GyHMabk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC90GyHMabk The announcement is here: https://twitter.com/CelesTrak/status/1547264390650527744 https://twitter.com/CelesTrak/status/1547264390650527744 For now, the person behind it's got a (informative) error message showing up: https://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-viz.php https://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-viz.php He's asking for donations, might be worth it. It was a good tool.
- rzimmerman 4y agoThe ask comes from T.S. Kelso who is well regarded in the orbit tracking/space debris field. He's done a lot of important work making this information public and a lot of public good for collision avoidance. If it's important to you feel free to offer support! It's not clear to me he's asking for money, probably just help and time.
- rajeshp1986 4y agoHow is this built? Is this built on d3.js? This reminded me of old flash style plugins which we don't see any more.
- runlevel1 4y agoIt's using Three.js[^1] with Photons[^2], and a number of other interesting libraries for calculation like satellite-js[^3]. [1]: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ [2]: https://github.com/mkkellogg/Photons https://github.com/mkkellogg/Photons [3]: https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js
- centrinoblue 4y agoThis ux/navigation implementation is inspiring esp for mobile safari web browser. Intuitive and responsive, kudos to the devs
- sosodev 4y agoI don't know which framework they're using, if any, but this is WebGL2. You can write fairly modern OpenGL code and run it in the browser. :)
- russellbeattie 4y agoImagine if this was to scale and each of the satellites was a giant floating city the size of Tokyo or LA? I wonder how many centuries will pass before that becomes a reality. It's sort of interesting that there's been a wonky steam punk movie about battling cities roaming the Earth, gobbling each other up, but none about the more plausible future where there are battles between giant orbiting cities who pass their hated rivals once every certain number of years.
- gtirloni 4y agoEnable Debris and be shocked.
- squarefoot 4y agoMost of those debris dots however aren't labeled; I wonder if they are actual debris.
- spaceman33 4y agoIt's a simulation of the number of smaller pieces of debris, but not their specific orbits.
- ourmandave 4y agoTry ground view with debris on. It looks like Asteroids after you've shot them into 10,000 micro asteroids. Just needs a UFO going pew-pew...
- hammock 4y agoHow do you launch a satellite without risking running into one of these things on the way up? Do you have to calculate the trajectories of all of them individually?
- doikor 4y agoYes they do know the trajectories so you put yours in a one where it should not hit anything. Most modern satellites also have engines so they can move on their orbit to dodge stuff if needed. Also remember that space is 3 dimensional so you can be at the same exact "spot" on this map but still be few kilometers apart. Also this visualization is kind of misleading as it makes the satellites look way too big. In reality you could not even see them from even from the closest zoom available.
- iandanforth 4y agoYes. But luckily computers are fast and the spaces between each of those dots is (usually) pretty big.
- chroma 4y agoRegarding launching and collisions: You mostly don't have to worry about it. The visualization makes space look crowded, but each satellite is over 150,000 times smaller than what is visualized. Space is very very big and very very empty. LEO is bigger than the surface of the earth and dozens of times thicker than the earth's crust. It only takes a few radar stations to track all the satellites, and the US Space Force makes their data public.[1][2] Most satellites don't have much in the way of maneuvering capabilities, so you don't need continuous tracking, just updates every few days or so. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillance_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan... 2. https://www.space-track.org/documentation#api https://www.space-track.org/documentation#api
- rtanks 4y agoThis is truly fascinating.
- greyhair 4y agoDoes anyone know what the altitude scaling is on this?
- spaceman33 4y agoShould be scaled accurately in xyz, just the size of the objects is exaggerated.
- ezconnect 4y agoAre the speed realtime? It seems they are really fast.
- possiblydrunk 4y agoI think if you set speed to 1, it's realtime.
- spaceman33 4y agoSetting the speed to 1 will make the clock tick at 1 second per second.
- niix 4y agoPardon my ignorance, but how in the hell do we get other things into space with all of this in way?
- gmiller123456 4y agoThe satellites are not to scale, most are very small.
- mlindner 4y agoThe displayed size is over 1000 times larger than they actually are.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 4y agoThe space station, apogee altitude 422 km, relies heavily on photon torpedos.
- mortenjorck 4y agoIf you enter "1" for the visualization speed, is that the actual recorded velocities?
- spaceman33 4y agoYes, setting it to 1 sets the simulation rate at 1 second per second.
- fidla 4y agoDoesn't work in Brave
- insane_dreamer 4y agoAmazing that each piece of debris is ID'd and tracked.
- johnklos 4y agoScott Manley, unsurprisingly, did a nice video showing what it'd look like if you could see all the satellites and debris in space from the surface of Earth. It's scary how much stuff there is up there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoNot really. Even low Earth orbit is absolutely gigantic. It’s considerably larger than the surface of the Earth after all. Scott Manley has the same issue that this website: for things to be seen, you need to magnify them extremely. Each dot here represents things at most meters large. Most are centimetres large especially if you look at debris. Yet each dot is the size of a large urban area on Earth. Do the same thing with planes or boats and the Earth will be close to painted a solid colour. Obviously, to size, you would see nothing from this distance which would be a lot less impressive, a lot less useful but a lot less scary.
- schiffern 4y ago>Obviously, to size would be less scary. I was expecting this, since it's probably the most common criticism of this type of visualization. Problem is, that analysis only looks at half the dataviz fidelity coin. It recognizes the (unavoidable) loss of fidelity in size, but it ignores the (also unavoidable) loss of fidelity in time. In the real world these objects do not remain orbiting Earth for a few minutes (ie the interval you're likely to look at this visualization). Instead, objects above ~800 km remain in Earth orbit for hundreds to thousands of years.[1] Mathematically this second inaccuracy tends to cancel out the first inaccuracy, therefore (presumably) making this "a lot more scary/impressive." Strangely I always see the criticism about size, but I never see the countervailing criticism about time. I suppose it's just like you said: the size factor is "obvious", but the time factor much less so. Eta: For some great visualizations of the space debris problem, I can heartily recommend this (slightly older) ESA video.[2] It's basically a full-length documentary crammed into 15 minutes. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifetime_Diagram_Low_Eccentricity.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13s&v=9cd0-4qOvb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13s&v=9cd0-4qOvb0
- insane_dreamer 4y agoThe "Unknown" objects are literally UFOs
- rainbringer2000 4y agoDamn that's impressive. Its hard to imagine being up that high
- everyone 4y agoAlready looks like Kessler syndrome.
- xwdv 4y agoImagine a visualization of all debris and litter that’s on the ground. Low Earth Orbit is very clean by comparison. This visualization makes it seem impassable and treacherous.
- noud 4y agoI'm amazed how large satellites have become. They are larger than small countries, like Luxembourg, Cyprus, Trinidad, ... How do they get these huge satellites up in space? Unbelievable...
- spaceman33 4y agoIf they were drawn actual size, the visualization would not be very interesting, you wouldn't be able to see anything.
- poulpy123 4y agoI'm impress by the number of objects (well mainly starlink) passing over my head every minute
- concordDance 4y agoIt's 25x time by default. Things are sped up a lot.
- poulpy123 4y agothanks I missed that
- kylethorne 4y agoWhy does New Zealand have so many beams? All of Australia has zero for comparison.
- cconcepts 4y agoNot just New Zealand but....somewhere in central Otago...of all places?
- jawadch93 4y ago[dead]
- Eduard 4y agoThere are so many Cosmos satellites
- DemocracyFTW2 4y ago"Oh my god it's full of junk"
- club_tropical 4y agoWhat's going on at the North pole?