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Low Earth Orbit Visualization
- tectonic 6y agoNice! LeoLabs is doing some very cool stuff. They're working on four additional radar installations for tracking space debris. Their current installations can track objects down to about a 10 cm diameter, but with their new installations they'll theoretically be able to track objects as small as 2 cm. In general, current radar systems tend to be limited on the lower end to objects in the 5-10 cm range. Systems like LeoLabs’ and the US Air Force’s upcoming Marshall Islands-based Space Fence will improve coverage, but still won’t see the 128 million objects from 1 mm to 1 cm. For perspective, a collision with a 10 cm object will likely completely destroy a satellite, a 1 cm object will likely disable it, and a 1 mm object may disable a subsystem. At closing velocities around 10 km/s, the kinetic energy of even an untrackable chip of paint is greater than the destructive power of an equivalent mass of stationary TNT. Whipple shields around the ISS’s crewed areas are built to absorb impacts with objects of up to around 1 cm. For anything bigger, an avoidance maneuver is used (if we see it coming).
- objectivetruth 6y agoThanks for the info! Do you know what the weird polyhedrons are over Alaska and New Zealand?
- Rebelgecko 6y agoProb their sensors' field of regard. Especially since the NZ and central USA ones look fence-y
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- leolabs_eng 6y agoYes, that is exactly what they represent.
- objectivetruth 6y agoOh, wow, then that just changed my whole understanding of what you're doing! Very cool.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoWow 2cm is still huge if it rams into the ISS at 10km/s. It's like a 20mm bullet with at least 5 times the speed of a gun round (not sure how fast guns are actually :) What are those 'whipple shields'? Are those the foil sheets that basically vaporise the object (and part of the shield) so it won't penetrate the inner hull? I assume they have better tracking than 2cm for the orbit the ISS is in? Does the ISS have its own radar warning? Though I guess if it sees it coming it's already too late for avoidance.
- Alupis 6y ago> It's like a 20mm bullet with at least 5 times the speed of a gun round (not sure how fast guns are actually :) For some perspective, 20mm is 0.787402 inches, so that would be approximately a .79 Caliber projectile. For comparison, a .50 BMG round exits the muzzle of a rifle anywhere between 2,895 ft/s up to 3,044 ft/s[1]. 3,044 ft/s == 927.81 m/s == 0.92781 km/s. So yes, this 20mm piece of space junk is travelling a lot faster than a bullet, and consequently would carry a lot more energy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG
- jccooper 6y ago> Are those the foil sheets that basically vaporise the object (and part of the shield) so it won't penetrate the inner hull? Yes. Orbital hypervelocity impacts basically vaporize immediately on hitting anything, so you can offset a thin material in front of what you want to protect and cause any incoming object to turn into a cone of many much smaller objects which are less likely to penetrate the main hull.
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- tectonic 6y agoIf you're into this stuff, we write about it in Orbital Index pretty frequently: https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com (Some of the paragraph I posted was excerpted from a recent issue.)
- jcun4128 6y agoI wonder is there a way to "make it scale" in the sense where the planet stays the same size but the satellites become like a pixel... so you can more accurately see how far apart things are... seems like "omg Kessler syndrome" whenever I see these things. Man this thing is nuts the zoom is neat
- Rebelgecko 6y agoI don't follow the space industry as closely as I used to so I don't know how true this is, but some folks have accused Leolabs of being a bit alarmist with their conjunction alerts. They have sent out alerts for collisions that the DoD said had essentially 0 chance of happening (and they didn't). If you were cynical, you might say that those sorts of false alarms are a marketing/PR stunt. If that's the case, it's in their best interest to not offer to-scale visualizations, making LEO look as crowded as possible.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThis is so amazingly cool. Wow. You can even see 3D models (probably from a list of standard ones) and how they tumble (I wonder how accurate that is?) Thanks vortex_ape. I love the way random cool stuff pops up on HN like this. PS: It does look a lot more crowded in space in this view than it actually is, because the objects are shown at like a million times their actual size :) And it doesn't show vertical separation graphically.
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- King-Aaron 6y agoThis might be a pretty basic question, but what do the large red areas denote?
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- meetups323 6y agoThe beams of the measurement apparatus.
- leolabs_eng 6y agoIt represents the field of view of the instruments (where the radar can see).
- daveslash 6y agoThank you. What is the difference between the two read areas showing pulsating beams and appear as blades growing upward and outward from the ground vs. the 6 pointed shape appearing to float over Alaska?
- aimor 6y agoThey're different types of radar systems. https://platform.leolabs.space/sites https://platform.leolabs.space/sites The pointed shape ones are 2D phased array radar. The radar is a grid of 4096 elements. It can observe things anywhere in the sky above it, however there are practical limits to how far off boresight it can operate. These limits are related to the arrangement of the elements, and result in the 6 pointed shape. The others are 1D phased array radar. They consist of a line of elements rather than a grid. They use a parabolic reflector along the length of the array to focus the radar's observable area to a single line to make up for that missing 2nd dimension. So the reflector limits the radar to only observing across a single line, and the array allows the radar to control where across the line to radiate or listen.
- joezydeco 6y agoI still have fond memories of NASA's J-Track, but this is a step up. Wow.
- oraphalous 6y agoDespite everything - sometimes you have to marvel at just how awesome the human race can be. This visualisation is one such moment for me.
- tashian 6y agoIt looks like a coronavirus
- leetrout 6y agoFilter for starlink in the top left and set the speed at 200 or so. Very interesting and entertaining. I’ve not been excited for a piece of tech in years but starlink has me on the edge of my seat. I can’t wait to get my equipment.
- mrep 6y agoZooming in is cool too as they all look like sailboats with their solar panels extended up. The trains look like one aligned sailboat army.
- danielyaa5 6y agodo you need a super computer to run this or what? The page was using up all my CPU and could still barely move the map
- poopsmithe 6y agoWhat GFX card do you have? It was running nice and smooth for me on the following system Linux Brave browser GTX 1070 (mobile version) i7-8700K CPU 16GB RAM
- meepmorp 6y agoRuns fine on my iPhone
- leolabs_eng 6y agoWas designed to run on anything relatively modern that can do 3d accelerated webgl. Should work on phones, tablets, and others. What're your specs?
- detritus 6y agoWorks well on my wee i5 laptop, and certainly a LOT better than ye olde NASA World Wind with all the satellite plugins added on, which regularly crashed my machine when I used to play with it back in 2005 or so!
- devbug 6y agoReally cool! I've been meaning to implement SGP4 from scratch as a learning exercise. What I found really interesting is how the USAF/NORAD tracks and reports objects in LEO: they publish Two-line Element Sets (TLEs), which are a fixed-width ASCII format derived from punch cards.[1] The format is pretty easy to parse.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-line_element_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-line_element_set [2]: https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle-fmt.php https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle-fmt.php [3]: https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/checksum.php https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/checksum.php
- jcims 6y agoJust want to give props to the skyfield python library. I have no idea what any of the numbers in the TLE mean but just by following some examples have been able to plot the location of Starlink satellites vs time very easily. https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ I’m feeding it into Graphana to help visualize how satellite coverage impacts the signal strength and network performance of my dish. It’s pretty fun.
- gpm 6y agoWhile we're listing libraries, I was super impressed with satellite.js for the same reasons https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js I used it to make https://droid.cafe/starlink https://droid.cafe/starlink
- jcims 6y agoYes!!! I used that as well and couldn’t temember the name.
- modeless 6y agoMany people don't know that you can actually see some of these satellites in the sky as they pass overhead, without a telescope or anything. I made a site to help catch them, which has been on HN before: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/
- poopsmithe 6y agoThank you. I've been wanting to spot some Starlink satellites for awhile, but I haven't been able to using sites that tell azimuth & elevation with a date. I like that your site shows the satellites superimposed on google street view so I know exactly where to look. I'm going to try to spot a starlink train tonight.
- walrus01 6y agoHey, I've had your site bookmarked for a while now. Wanted to say thanks for making it.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoThis is mind-bendingly nice, wow. Thanks a lot.
- bloopernova 6y agoYour site is wonderful and you are also wonderful. Thank you for creating that, it's really useful!
- dilyevsky 6y agoI remember being able to see them fly over slowly when hunting in northern russia as a kid. Maybe my eyesight is not so good anymore but I doubt it’s doable within few hundred miles of any major population center today.
- modeless 6y agoISS is much brighter now than any satellite you would have seen then. Sometimes it can even be seen before sunset. Other satellites sometimes get bright enough to be seen in large cities too.
- altitudinous 6y agoPretty incredible. I would like to see the assets to scale though, otherwise it seems crowded up there when it clearly isn't. It reminds me of all those graphics a year ago of the Australian bushfires where the fires were represented by huge graphics that were completely out of scale to the actual fire and folk actually believed that Australia was just charcoal!
- cma 6y agoWhat is the easiest way in the markets to bet on Kessler Syndrome?
- simonh 6y agoI'm getting a little more relaxed about Kessler Syndrome the more I look into it, at least in the short term. Each of those icons is about 10km across and the satellites are at different orbital altitudes. Also objects in LEO eventually drop into the atmosphere due to drag. As you move out of LEO the average distances between satellites balloons. For satellites in geosynchronous orbit each one is allocated a 'box' around 70km across although they can drift especially when they lose power and there are some in rogue orbits. For comparison it's estimated that approximately 100 tons of pebbles and dust fall into the atmosphere every day, and plenty more just drifts past Earth continuously. We do need to come up with better mitigating controls and accidents will happen, but I think it's achievable.
- cma 6y agoHopefully if it happens it is a short term LEO event and we are able to learn from it. There has already been one satellite-satellite collision, one is not a lot of data points to extrapolate from, but that event raises my wariness a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
- donclark 6y agoDo meteors entering the earths atmosphere interfere with any of these? And if so, is documented somewhere?
- Fordec 6y agoThis just made me realize, if cars are to satellites, we don't really have a bus to xyz equivalent. Cars are great and all, it gave a generation flexibility to go where they like but they don't scale. There are denser forms of transport for urban areas like rail or bus. And as the sky gets more debris filled it's going to be like the urban area analogy where we need a public transport for space where we co-locate payloads on one object at scale. Some places host a 3rd party payload on one satellite, but nobody hosts 50 on one structure.
- tonyarkles 6y agoOne of the harder parts about that is setting up the attitude of the SV so that each payload gets time pointed at the earth (if that's what it cares about). A while back I worked on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASSIOPE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASSIOPE, which had multiple payloads, and giving each of them appropriate earth-facing time at specific parts of the orbit was... a delicate scheduling problem.
- williesleg 6y agoAnother hit piece sponsored by monopoly isp's
- soheil 6y agoI wish there was a direct link to each object so we could link to individual objects.
- soheil 6y agoThis incredibly awesome, I wonder what the ratio of displayed size of each object is to their actual size.
- soheil 6y agoI'd also like to know if there are non-artificial objects orbiting earth what their ratio is compared to man-made objects. Are there an equal amount or perhaps more comet/astroid-type objects that we simply don't track?
- soheil 6y agoThe way they're laid out on the map looks like there should be thousands of collisions every second. True size of each object is not perceptible on this and the distance between each object. Is there a log of collisions in real time?
- modeless 6y agoCollisions are not frequent enough to need a real time updated log. I believe Wikipedia's list of 4 unintentional high speed collisions is exhaustive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
- soheil 6y agoWhat percentage of these objects are dead or out of commission?
- winrid 6y agoIs speed 1 = "realtime"? By the way, look for the starlink sats. Very cool. Wonder how many conjunctions they've had :)
- Karawebnetwork 6y agoToday's Conjunctions https://platform.leolabs.space/visualizations/conjunctions/today https://platform.leolabs.space/visualizations/conjunctions/t...
- AlphaGeekZulu 6y agoAnd this is only the Low Earth Orbit (without geostationary satellites and GPS). Incredible. And incredibly nicely done by NeoLabs!
- abhayhegde 6y agoIncredibly awesome! Are we seeing the exact altitude also?
- chacha2 6y agoWhat is New Zealand up to? Looks dangerous.
- Karawebnetwork 6y agoThe Kiwi Space Radar (KSR), located in the Central Otago region of New Zealand, is the third radar in LeoLabs’ global radar network. KSR is an advanced radar based off LeoLabs’ proprietary S-band technology and consists of multiple one-dimensional phased array radar systems. KSR is the first of LeoLabs’ systems in the Southern Hemisphere, and the first of its systems that is sensitive to small, currently untracked space debris. https://platform.leolabs.space/sites/ksr https://platform.leolabs.space/sites/ksr
- soheil 6y agoIs it fair game if a space company developed a craft that gathered and collected the non-working objects or somehow brought them back to earth and mined their precious metals or otherwise take their technology etc?
- zuhayeer 6y agoFeel that initially when you load this page, it looks crowded. Which for visualization sake makes sense, but it definitely doesn’t do space justice. It’s just so vast, and there’s so much more space that all these satellites would practically be invisible.
- rkagerer 6y agoThey look like the little biological microbe thingies from Spore.