Low Earth Orbit Visualization
platform.leolabs.space
platform.leolabs.space
Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.
Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the ones that you can see with the unaided eye.
There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright and can even be seen before sunset. The new Chinese space station Tiangong is also a good one to try. In the next few weeks it's expected that the recently launched BlueWalker-3 will become quite bright too as it expands its enormous phased array antenna (64 square meters!). But the coolest is probably if you can catch a recently launched Starlink train, 50 satellites all visible simultaneously or within seconds of each other. (A few weeks after launch the Starlink satellites are no longer visible as they reach their operational orbits.)
Thank you!
>The information that Chrome sends to Google Location Services may include:
>The Wi-Fi routers closest to you
>Cell IDs of the cell towers closest to you
>The strength of your Wi-Fi or cell signal
>The IP address that is currently assigned to your device
https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to this.
I mean, you can have a street full of iPhones - which I assume is a regular occurrence in USA, where people trust Apple - and still Google Maps on iPhone would guess well enough where you are. For example, I'm far away from the street and Google hasn't passed here recently, so my WiFi-based location is always way off (using Android). In my other home (and vacation home in another country) it's the opposite, because the cars have passed quite recently.
The story checks out so far for me... but I am kinda lazy to search for the source on this right now, so pls share if you have it.
Which part of GDPR would prevent Google from collecting pairs of (Wi-Fi BSSID, approx lat/lon), with the consent that you gave when you set up your Android phone, and using it for their own purpose without giving it to any third party?
Does this mean the US probably has satellites that can easily pick up cell signals anywhere in the world from space?
It's not as easy to see as in this visualization, but Jonathan McDowell (https://twitter.com/planet4589) posts graphs on his website of each launch of starlink satellites as they raise orbits. https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html
Scroll down to the individual launches and there's images you can click on of the orbit raising progress of each launch.
Example of the Starlink 4-21 mission that launched on July 7th of this year: https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/spl51.jpg (One satellite failed, which isn't that unusual, and will de-orbit probably sometime early next year if they don't recover it.)
I can't speak with any authority, but in general a train of satellites would likely be moving in an orbit with either the apogee/perigee similar to the target orbits, but the other end of the orbit being higher or lower. Each time the train reaches the extremum at the target altitude, one of the satellites thrusts to adjust the other side of its orbit to target, which pushes it out of the pack.
The specifics may be so different as to make that explanation totally wrong but it's probably not too far from the general principle.
Holy S$#! I didn't know about that.
Are there links between this Space Force project and Starlink?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
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...
I otherwise totally agree with your point.
I also wonder, how do they track so many objects? Who actually tracks them? How much does it cost (energy, engineers) to maintain the tracking systems?
Edit: Are these all simulated orbits? Is there a big "orbit registry" somewhere? And what are the "beams"?
It then sells that information to spacecraft operators, who may be using the orbital information to determine if their spacecraft has a risk of hitting another object in space, or to figure out where their spacecraft are in the first place (usually when they're not talking to the ground).
How do they track them? With big expensive radar systems, mostly paid for by the military. It's an international collaboration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness#Systems
For posterity, this was the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC90GyHMabk
The announcement is here: https://twitter.com/CelesTrak/status/1547264390650527744
For now, the person behind it's got a (informative) error message showing up: https://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-viz.php
He's asking for donations, might be worth it. It was a good tool.
LeoLabs: Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413373 - May 2022 (3 comments)
LeoLabs: low earth orbit visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180865 - April 2022 (1 comment)
Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 - March 2021 (93 comments)
Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct objects in LEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 - Oct 2020 (150 comments)
Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165645 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
I think you can get a decent sense of how crowded (or not) an area is by watching how many objects pass though it. The state that I live in looks like it has somewhere between 1 and 10 satellites above it at any given time, which drives home the point that LEO isn't quite as "busy" as it feels from a zoomed-out, sped-up view of the map.
That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?
The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and they occasionally will pretend one of their classified satellites doesn't exist, but there's only a handful of these.
Huge if true.
The interesting aspects of them have to do with how far off-axis they can function. This was the major consequence of loss of the Morison leak of the KH-11 shots of a Soviet carrier to Jane's Defense Weekly — the image revealed how far off-axis it could image and some clues to how it processed imagery.
I don't have any domain knowledge here, so can't argue either way, but one possibility I can imagine is it's a place holder for "somebody launched something and we just don't have the records yet". No clue how realistic that is, and I'd trust my sibling comment's explanation more, but it wouldn't shock me if it takes time for info to propagate.
Do you know if there's been any news on KSP2? At this point I'm not sure it will ever happen.
Each dot here represents things at most meters large. Most are centimetres large especially if you look at debris. Yet each dot is the size of a large urban area on Earth. Do the same thing with planes or boats and the Earth will be close to painted a solid colour.
Obviously, to size, you would see nothing from this distance which would be a lot less impressive, a lot less useful but a lot less scary.
I was expecting this, since it's probably the most common criticism of this type of visualization.
Problem is, that analysis only looks at half the dataviz fidelity coin. It recognizes the (unavoidable) loss of fidelity in size, but it ignores the (also unavoidable) loss of fidelity in time.
In the real world these objects do not remain orbiting Earth for a few minutes (ie the interval you're likely to look at this visualization). Instead, objects above ~800 km remain in Earth orbit for hundreds to thousands of years.[1]
Mathematically this second inaccuracy tends to cancel out the first inaccuracy, therefore (presumably) making this "a lot more scary/impressive."
Strangely I always see the criticism about size, but I never see the countervailing criticism about time. I suppose it's just like you said: the size factor is "obvious", but the time factor much less so.
Eta: For some great visualizations of the space debris problem, I can heartily recommend this (slightly older) ESA video.[2] It's basically a full-length documentary crammed into 15 minutes.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...
It’s a real time visualisation. There is no loss of fidelity in time.
Noticing the important distortion in size is legitimate. It’s not really a criticism by the way. It’s simply that the impression of fullness inherent to this visualisation is misleading. Space is obviously mostly empty.
> Instead, objects above ~800 km remain in Earth orbit for hundreds to thousands of years.[1]
And satellites bellow 600km are only there for a couple of years and those bellow 500km a year top. Let’s not forget that area scales with the square of radius.
> Mathematically this second inaccuracy tends to cancel out the first inaccuracy, therefore (presumably) making this "a lot more scary/impressive."
I’m guessing you mean we have to take into account the fact these objects orbit a long time when considering collisions but that’s a separate issue entirely. The two don’t cancel out at all mathematically in any meaningful way.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying debris are not an issue. The new deorbiting rules are definitely a good thing.
Unless you're going to spend multiple lifetimes watching it in "real time," there is unavoidable loss of fidelity here.
I don't mean fidelity in rate-of-time, but in duration-of-time. The total time available limits the duration fidelity, just as our eyeballs and screens limit the size fidelity.
Again it's less obvious (hence this confusion), but it's no less unavoidable.
>Noticing the important distortion in size is legitimate. It’s not really a criticism by the way. It’s simply... misleading.
Extrapolating real-time events into long stretches of time is also demonstrably misleading to humans. See: the history of scientific discoveries in geology.
Your point about "legitimacy" is right on. In data visualization the goal is finding the most useful (least misleading) transform of the data, not raw fidelity.
It's just that, for the purposes of lifetime collision probability estimation, rate-of-time fidelity is more misleading than duration-of-time fidelity (since you can't have both!).
>the fact these objects orbit a long time when considering collisions
Bingo. The "scariness" comes from (where else?) the collision probability, and our estimate thereof.
>The two don’t cancel out at all mathematically in any meaningful way.
I don't claim perfect cancellation with nothing left, just that it "tends" to cancel out (ie it pushes in the opposite direction), and that this factor was being ignored.
I made no point about legitimacy. The fact remains. It is a real time visualisation. It’s interesting to consider what’s currently flying above. It’s not a collision estimation tool.
> Bingo. The "scariness" comes from (where else?) the collision probability, and our estimate thereof.
There is nothing scary about the probability of collision however. Even when you take the very large safety margin the monitoring organisations like to take probability is very low.
Agreed, but then why did you say it gets less "scary" when you realize the size is exaggerated here?
What else could you be scared of, if you're not (implicitly) using the visualization to estimate collision probability?
Some sort of thalassephobia for giant space objects, perhaps?
>probability is very low
Now keep rolling those dice every day for hundreds or thousands of years. Thousands of dice, for thousands of objects.
People are historically bad at imagining that (just like we're bad at large distances), which is why compressing the duration is misleading.
Risk = probability * cost. The cost of collisions (both the immediate cost and the long-term cost from additional debris generation) is very high.
>There is nothing scary about the probability of collision
If you watch the video I linked earlier, it explains how we're already past the "tipping point." Even if all launches cease (spoiler: they won't), the debris problem would continue to get worse.
Maybe that isn't a scary situation to you, but it is to me.
It’s a comment about how full it is, not about how likely things are to collide and a reply to a previous comment.
> Now keep rolling those dice every day for hundreds of years. Thousands of dice, for thousands of objects.
Still low.
Orbits between 700km and 800km are mostly lost after the past two decade antisatellites tests. Lower orbits clean fast especially the ones used by the recent large satellites fleet and space above 800km is mostly empty apart from the band with large USSR boosters which is easy to avoid.
Risk is not very high. It is managed adequately and the legislation is properly anticipating current developments.
It’s important to remember that space is extremely large and we are talking about thousands of things. Having too much debris clustered in a small range of altitude makes it not economically viable to operate there but it doesn’t prevent us from going through at all.
Why is that "scary," though?
It's not like "running out of room" is a plausible risk. Kessler Syndrome limits you long before that.
>Risk is not very high. It is managed adequately and the legislation is properly anticipating current developments
See my edit to parent, and watch the video (especially the future simulations). The situation is far from "managed adequately" IMO.
This has been fun, and I sense we're starting to go in circles (no pun intended). My upvotes, for being such a good sport. Cheers!
Seems like we’re going in circles here. Kessler syndrome is about collisions. But one can be concerned about the fullness of a medium without the risk of collisions being the primary concern. This is the case for everyday things like road traffic, restaurant lines, etc.
That's what I said...
>This is the case for everyday things like road traffic, restaurant lines, etc.
Bad analogy. The "fullness" of space behaves in a way that's precisely unlike those 'common sense' scenarios.
Collisions are the limiting factor in this domain. If you're not considering collisions, you're not accurately capturing the idea of "fullness."
I don’t understand this argument at all. As stated previously, it’s a real time visualization, thus there is trivially no loss of fidelity in time. To claim that is like claiming that a live web cam of a city street has a loss in fidelity because it doesn’t show what the street will look like in 100 years.
Just like humans have trouble imagining/seeing large spans of space (hence the necessity of size enlargement), humans also have trouble extrapolating to long spans of time (hence the necessity of using actual collisional evolution simulations, not "guesstimating" based on pictures or animations).
The size enlargement effect makes the "guesstimate" tend to overestimate, and the time duration compression effect makes it tend to underestimate. From the start the whole thing is fundamentally a bad method of "guesstimation," but for some reason people tend to quickly raise the former issue and completely overlook the latter.
I.e. the likelihood of hitting an object using a LEO view that is facing parallel to the earth's surface below the viewer
The idea is that in every direction is a color map indicating probability of hitting an object if going straight in that direction to infinity, or till reaching earth's surface (for downward angles), assuming all the objects are frozen in time
Not sure how to represent earth's surface though without fudging the color map colors, so maybe scratch that or use outlines to represent continents instead of surface color
Its an idea maybe?
I'd say the risk is exaggerated in some ways and not in other ways. Kessler syndrome is a real effect but it's also not something that happens suddenly when some threshold is reached. It comes from statistics and generally assumes that no preventative action is taken when satellites are destined to collide with each other. It also assumes no attempts to clean up debris happens. Both of which are not the case in general. Many countries have rules that say that satellites cannot be left in orbit after end of mission (in the US for example that is currently 25 years, and there is effort right now to reduce that to 5 years). This kind of cuts the effects of kessler syndrome short.
Further, Kessler syndrome is different for different altitudes. People keep talking about it with respect to Starlink, but at the altitudes where the Starlink satellites orbit, because of atmospheric drag, debris don't last longer than a decade or so so. This means there isn't enough time for that statistical effect to build up and destroy most satellites, at least at current satellite densities.
There's also the argument that kessler syndrome has in fact already begun. As mentioned, it's a statistical effect that happens over time. Imagine the slowest burning smoldering campfire that takes decades or centuries to burn through it's fuel.
In short, I feel like current plans to reduce the allowed maximum debris lifetimes by some countries (as long as we can get all major space launch countries to agree) will largely make the kessler syndrome not really a risk.
No more scary than the number of airplanes in the air at any given time, which is a similar order of magnitude. flightradar24 tracks around 200k flights per day — there's probably ~10k–20k aircraft in the air at any time.
It only takes a few radar stations to track all the satellites, and the US Space Force makes their data public.[1][2] Most satellites don't have much in the way of maneuvering capabilities, so you don't need continuous tracking, just updates every few days or so.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
Also this visualization is kind of misleading as it makes the satellites look way too big. In reality you could not even see them from even from the closest zoom available.
Even 10 years ago, that thought would have been ludicrous.
For more detail than you ever wanted, check here: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
It's sort of interesting that there's been a wonky steam punk movie about battling cities roaming the Earth, gobbling each other up, but none about the more plausible future where there are battles between giant orbiting cities who pass their hated rivals once every certain number of years.
[1]: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
It looks like Asteroids after you've shot them into 10,000 micro asteroids.
Just needs a UFO going pew-pew...
Side note: does anyone know of a good tool / app for looking at things like that on iOS ?
Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?
Traffic management is an ongoing debate with the current solution simply being ground based tracking and orbit management.
It's my understanding that atmospheric drag and orbital perturbations due to the gravity of other celestial bodies cause satellites to need station keeping maneuvers just to avoid crashing into the Earth. So it seems to me that this debris problem will eventually take care of itself.
That your powerful GPU was putting in some effort while my poky GPU [edit: and my 2018 low-end Android phone, admittedly at ~4FPS] are still able to render the scene at all indicates to me that they put in some impressive effort to make the graphics scale for different configurations!
It's like a bad API. The docs say to send, but there's no mechanism to receive. It's not the fault of the user.
We have more boats and planes than there are orbital objects. If you open flightradar you'll see an absolute abomination of planes flying overhead. Yet, unless you live close to an airport, you probably won't see any. The planet is really large. Space is larger still.
We worry about orbital debris because of the consequence of loss. There's a lot of room up there (not discounting everyone's concern).
Is it unity or Godot or something?
Edit: I'm in Hong Kong.