Posted on 04/10/2018 8:24:30 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Link only, no text.
The site shows satellites and major space junk orbiting Earth. Place your cursor over a dot and it will display the orbit and details about what it is. You can see the geosynchronous Geo Belt where satellite slots are spaced about 1 degree apart.
This is a really interesting site. It is a wonder there are not more collisions.
Imagine an major EMP (natural or man-made), causing loss of control of just half of the LEO-Sats....
The re-entry storm could be quite entertaining.
Lots of stuff, but lots more space.
Great site! The animation is not to scale. Space is really large. Also, all sats in GEO are moving at the exact same speed and in the same direction, so collisions are rare.If the separation between sats in GEO is one degree, then they are still over 200 miles apart.
Thanks. What a mess.
“What a mess”
I took one look——and went elsewhere——there are some things that I’d rather not know.
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i watched the space station go by tonight and thought the same thing. This beautiful thing passing across the sky, i wonder if it will hit some space junk and that will be that. I know i’m weird, but I get a text message from NASA every time it crosses in my area and I go out to the deck to watch it pass through the skyline. I actually enjoy watching it cross the sky at night and imagine what they must see. Kind of cool.
Lots of stuff, but lots more space.
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That’s right. Tiny little objects in an immense space.
One of the experiments sent to the ISS on the last SpaceX launch was designed to test various junk removal techniques to help clean up low earth orbit.
In the GEO belt the satellites do not just stay put. The sun and moon pull them out of perfect GEO orbit into inclined orbits where the orbit is inclined relative to the equator. GEO satellites all have to carry fuel to do station keeping E-W since they are close together. But N-S station keeping is sometimes not done and the satellites have a figure eight movement over the ground. As long as they cross the equator in the right slot is the important thing. Due to the inclination of Earth's axis, Geo satellites get pulled south at local noon by about a degree of inclination per year. Some satellites are too heavy to carry fuel for N-S station keeping so they will launch about 8 degrees north inclination at local noon and decay to 8 degrees south over 16 years, the normal satellite lifetime at GEO.
The space junk harpoon, I’ve heard about this. It will get the larger stuff but not the thousands of tin can or smaller sized stuff that pose a threat to any working satellite. And with each collision, a dozen or so new pieces of junk.
I got email alerts from NASA last year and, you’re right, it’s fun.
n2yo.com. has each individual sat track and tells when it is visible in your area.
Good thing the earth is flat.
A CME like the one in 1859 (Carrington Flare) directly hitting the Earth would cause the upper layer of the troposphere to grow hundreds of kilometers.
That could potentially catch LEOs into the atmosphere, where they would immediately start to heat up and be dragged down into a fiery crash.
We need to get rid of the “Jews in Space”.
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