Show HN: The story of space debris, made with WebGL for the Royal Institution | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The story of space debris, made with WebGL for the Royal Institution

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36 pointsstugrey10 comments

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NASA have a quartery newsletter on space debris called, appropriately enough, The Orbital Debris Quarterly News.

http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter....

(Just in case it's not obvious: Click the yellow link to see the animated visualization.)

Each debris has a different color. What does it mean?

Do the page download all the initial data and make a simulation or it download the positions periodically?

There is a ring at high altitude. What is it's origin? Geocentric satellites? (I think there is another ring at medium altitude, but I'm not sure.)

Does this show the satellites that are currently in use or only the unuseful debris? Can you add a button to show/hide them?

Author here,

The debris is coloured to match the descriptive text.

Each years data is loaded when the user gets to that part of the visualisation.

The ring you see is indeed all of the satellites in geosynchronous orbit. You can also see the orbits of many of the GNSS satellites in medium Earth orbit if you stare hard enough for long enough!

This shows all objects (functioning and debris) in orbit at the time in question.

Impressive, nice work :-)

It's a bit surprising to me that it's not made more clear that the individual pieces of debris are not to scale. That is, just glancing at the visualization (especially the early ones in the presentation that focus on low Earth orbit) would lead the viewer to believe that space is much more crowded than it actually is. This in turn would make the viewer believe that collisions are much more likely than they actually are.

Unfortunately, to show the Earth and the orbital positions to scale, it was not possible to show the pieces of debris to scale.

Yes, sorry. The not-to-scale aspect meant it jumped the shark almost immediately for me as well. As small as possible, following the initial display of the object, might have conveyed the idea better - and that would have made the Chinese explosion a little more fun.

But see also the NASA visualisation on the NASA orbital debris site: http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/

I understand the technical limitations, but it appears that you have an axe to grind: sounding the alarm about space debris. In that context it seems disingenuous to show space as more crowded than it is.

FYI, this was broken behind my company proxy.

I think the proxy was rewriting the "Content-Range" request header, which is used in the function (papaparse.js:533):

function getFileSize(xhr) { var contentRange = xhr.getResponseHeader("Content-Range"); return parseInt(contentRange.substr(contentRange.lastIndexOf("/") + 1)); }

I could work around this by using the "Content-Length" header instead, which was available.

Once it was working, I thought it worked quite well, with only a little bit of stuttering and visual glitches detracting from the presentation, but those are probably on my end :)

I have seen a at least one similar presentations before, so I wonder if you were involved in any other similar things, or have borrowed concepts from them?

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