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What's So Special About Low-Earth Orbit?
- tsotha 11y agoFrom an energy perspective, as Heinlein pointed out "Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."
- phreeza 11y agoExcept if you want to go somewhere - and then stay there.
- a3n 11y agoOnce you go somewhere, you're halfway to staying there.
- Dylan16807 11y agoCapture doesn't need all that much energy unless you're taking a really impatient path to a distant location.
- fsg7sdfg789 11y agoBeyond the information presented, this is really neat to see interactive visualizations with code that can be edited inline. It reduces the apparent distance between "wow cool visualization" and the code that generated it. The more people see code regularly, and can connect it with something they understand, the more likely they are to be code fluent.
- Macsenour 11y agoProlly off topic but: I show my code to my sister who is a professional artist every chance I get. It demystifies the process in her mind and makes me better at understanding what is happening around her.
- dharma1 11y agoI was delighted to learn recently you can get a nanosatellite to orbit for not very much money, and at the same time disappointed to find out that it would not stay up there for very long. Somehow I thought satellites could stay on orbit permanently
- zardo 11y agoThere are a couple projects working on miniaturized ion drives for cube sats.
- dharma1 11y agohow much energy do these consume? would solar panels on a cubesat provide enough energy for staying on orbit for years?
- rtkwe 11y agoYep there's still a good bit of atmospheric drag even at the ISS's altitude. Once you get beyond the atmosphere you get solar wind creating drag too. The ISS is periodically reboosted into a higher orbit by engines on one of the Russian modules.
- DavidSJ 11y agoAlso, small satellites have much higher surface area to mass ratios.
- rtkwe 11y agoYeah that's another big factor in how fast they decay. The fact that they deorbit easily is good though, if they stayed up for a long time it'd be harder for NASA to approve so many so easily because they'd become a threat to LEO operations. A lot of them are launched from the ISS.
- dharma1 11y agoHow do the approvals work if you are not in the US?
- Terr_ 11y agoI'd be interesting to see some example orbits re-scaled so that instead of showing physical distance, their "altitude" is actually the energy necessary to establish and maintain them for a reasonable period of time.
- Amorymeltzer 11y agoSomeething like xkcd's Gravity Wells (https://xkcd.com/681/ https://xkcd.com/681/) but for orbits would be neat indeed.