3 ms·
If 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.
by jcims 4y ago
If 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”?