Interactive graphic: Every active satellite orbiting earth | Hacker News Reader

Interactive graphic: Every active satellite orbiting earth

qz.com

91 pointsuptown13 comments

That's just gorgeous.

It shows velocity with a unit of "km" rather than "km/s" which was confusing, but still very cool.

This is what I expected from the original article. Thanks.

Very cool! Didn't work for me on Chrome 53.0 on OS X, for some reason. All I could see was the earth, no dots at all. Hovering around with the pointer would show me some blue orbits.

Same here, Chrome 53.0.2785.116 on OSx 10.10.2 shows just the Earth, and when I hover on a dot it shows the trajectory.

And every little point moves? This is really amazing simulation/model.

Could be a coincidence, but did they actually keep track of the current position of the sun? That's an impressive attention to detail.

Knowing that the way an object orbits the planet is essentially infinitely falling toward it, but missing, I thought this was incredible:

"At an altitude of 35,786 km, satellites orbit at the same speed the earth turns, once every 24 hours, hanging usefully and lucratively over a single location to transmit and receive information."

I knew the earth spins fast, but putting those two facts together was really cool. Sitting here, I'm thinking how did I miss this before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit

NASA J-Track 3D: https://science.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html

I came to suggest J-Track, and it's nice to see the page still active after over a decade, but I think stuffin.space is an excellent update.

It looks like this page doesn't even work for me. And even if it did, the Java plugin was old. Looks like NASA never updated it as promised in 2012.

If you didn't notice, try the easter egg: "To see the relative speed of orbits (and possibly melt your browser), press Q and then the space bar. "

This is probably the most gorgeous article I've seen from Quartz yet. I am deeply amazed.

Easter egg mode: press Q once you've started the animation.

Kessler collapse when

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