Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?
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.)
I have used your site to successfully spot Starlink trains and the ISS several times. It's very well-designed and the included street view overlay especially helps with knowing where in the sky to look.
This site is great and is one of my favorites. I occasionally check it and set an alarm on my phone. I will announce to the people that I am with "satellites passing in 3 minutes", run outside and impress people. Great fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Wow. I allowed Chrome to know my location for the first time and Street View was in my front door. I thought it was going to use the IP but it's impossible to be that accurate, does it Chrome use my Home on my profile location or something like that?
When you enable location, Chrome will send some pieces of information about your computer to Google Location Services to get your GPS location. Then Chrome sends that GPS location to the site you're visiting. Using information from your profile wouldn't be accurate if you were e.g. at a coffee shop.
>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
I put the "not on anything related to this" part in to clarify that although I'm speaking about Google and work at Google, I'm not really a firsthand source, I'm just providing thirdhand information.
I believe this data mainly comes from phones, not street view cars. There are about a million times more phones out there than street view cars, and they all have GPS and Wifi. Apple had this feature long before Apple Maps was a thing, and they didn't license Street View data from Google.
Is it related to Android though? I read somewhere/thought that it is primarily the Google Maps cars recording WiFi data and not phones). Europe wouldn't be covered at all if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)
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.
> Europe wouldn't be covered at all if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)
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?
They give it to a third party - other chrome users. I was once in a train, and location services located me in a suburb hundreds of km away - clearly I was traveling with someone living there, using a portable/mobile hotspot. These kind of edge cases are hard to prevent (and rare), but still can lead to serious fines.
Your example doesn't demonstrate Google giving the data to other Chrome users. Making decisions based on the data is not the same as giving the data out.
I just watched Tiangong space station with my bare eyes. Beautiful.
Looking forward to watch 14 starlink satellites tomorrow.
Thank you so much for your website.
Hey just want to say thanks a ton for making this. My son and I went out side and laid on the patio watching the starlink sats pass by and it was neat. We never realized that they were there.
Times are displayed in the time zone your device's clock is set to. Unless you use the "Change Location" feature, in which case local time zone of the selected location will be used, with explicit time zone abbreviations shown.
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.)
And the adjacent graphs show phase (line growing longer, spreading along an orbit), and plane (line breaking into multiple lines slotting into nearby orbits). Positioning is accomplished by spending time at different-than-deployed altitudes, mostly lower. Lower gives a difference in nodal precession (Earth being non-spherical), IIRC something vaguely like half a degree/day difference out of several deg/day, slowly changing plane westward. Thus plane changes take weeks of drifting. Launch being far more about "go fast (in some direction)" than "while being high", rapid plane change (direction change) would have prohibitive "launch-like" energy cost. So a single launch will populate one or few nearby planes. And finally lower orbits orbit faster, quickly overtaking deployed sats in a single plane to reach deployment positions. Kerbal Space Program is thought a fun way to play with such.
> At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?
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.
Thank 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.
Yes, 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...
We 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.
With 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.
I 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”?
I don't really know what I'm looking at here, but it feels very sci-fi and I'm into it.
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"?
LEOlabs operates its own radar systems that point upwards-ish. The "beams" you see are the fields of view of their radars. When an object crosses that field of view going at orbital speeds, LEOlabs tracks it and uses the partial trajectory information to figure out the orbit of the object. From there, it can potentially associate that object with existing objects in its own and other databases (the US Space Force, which operates its own radars, is one of the best-known).
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).
Is there a big orbit registry somewhere? Yes. https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/osoindex/search-ng.jspx Each individual object is observed every few weeks, and then they estimate its current position with math and physics.
That's how all space debris tracking works. Luckily orbits are rather predictable paths, but there's still atmospheric drag, lunar and solar gravity, non-uniform Earth gravity, solar photon pressure and measurement imprecision to deal with.
The US Air Force, for one, is responsible for tracking everything it sees. That generally means computing TLAs for each object. Whether they release this info, I don't know.
This made me look up a link to my old favourite for this kind of thing, CelesTrak.org . Unfortunately, they discontinued their visualizer due to licensing problems.
The ask comes from T.S. Kelso who is well regarded in the orbit tracking/space debris field. He's done a lot of important work making this information public and a lot of public good for collision avoidance. If it's important to you feel free to offer support! It's not clear to me he's asking for money, probably just help and time.
Right, because apart from the moon, all objects orbiting the earth are considerably smaller than the New York Metropolitan Area which would not be your understanding if you took the visualization to be a scale representation.
I mean, you need to actually be able to see the objects for it to be a visualization though. If the satellites were drawn to scale they'd be smaller than a pixel.
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.
There's another comment saying that the ISS to scale at the default zoom would be roughly 1/150th of a pixel. It stands to reason that every satellite here is much, much smaller than that.
That's really cool. I know this comment is low-effort, but I don't really care - this type of real-time visualization is really interesting and I want to see more of this sort of thing going forward.
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?
Often you can figure out what spacecraft/rocket a piece of debris came from with a good catalogue of orbits and some math - these are labeled "Debris." Often you just can't - these are labeled "Unknown."
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.
Oh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space Force catalog.
I'd add that it would be pointless to try to hide a fair number of them, given that they approach the size of school buses (no joke — the now-retired KH-9 was nicknamed "Big Bird" for good reason) and can be imaged on relatively consumer-ready optics. Some Russians made a nice stink a few years ago by using (IIRC) laser illumination to make some relatively high-res shots of American recce sats.
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 only saw one blue dot while looking around (briefly on a laggy computer, so there are probably plenty of others): "L6188942", which you can isolate in the view by searching for it. https://www.n2yo.com/database/?id=81078#results shows there are no results for the "NORAD ID" for that same object.
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.
Scott Manley, unsurprisingly, did a nice video showing what it'd look like if you could see all the satellites and debris in space from the surface of Earth. It's scary how much stuff there is up there.
Not really. Even low Earth orbit is absolutely gigantic. It’s considerably larger than the surface of the Earth after all. Scott Manley has the same issue that this website: for things to be seen, you need to magnify them extremely.
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.
> 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.
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.
>It’s a real time visualisation. There is no loss of fidelity in time.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Unless you're going to spend multiple lifetimes watching it in "real time," there is unavoidable loss of fidelity here.
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.
Not fidelity in rate of time. Fidelity in total duration of time.
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.
Maybe I’m optimistic, but I believe within a decade full and rapid reusability of launch vehicles, i.e. Starship (if successful), will radically change what is economical in space, to the point of collecting/deorbiting space debris.
Maybe better to show a probability density instead?
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
I'm not an expert but I would say I've spent a lot of time looking at this.
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.
True, but they can be methodically grounded if need be, and we’ve done it successfully before. We don’t have any good playbooks for clearing space debris.
How do you launch a satellite without risking running into one of these things on the way up? Do you have to calculate the trajectories of all of them individually?
Regarding launching and collisions: You mostly don't have to worry about it. The visualization makes space look crowded, but each satellite is over 150,000 times smaller than what is visualized. Space is very very big and very very empty. LEO is bigger than the surface of the earth and dozens of times thicker than the earth's crust.
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.
Yes they do know the trajectories so you put yours in a one where it should not hit anything. Most modern satellites also have engines so they can move on their orbit to dodge stuff if needed. Also remember that space is 3 dimensional so you can be at the same exact "spot" on this map but still be few kilometers apart.
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.
This is fascinating. Can someone point me to resources that explain Starlink's seemingly (but obviously not) random trajectories as well as their positions (some in a line, some on individual trajectories).
The ones all in a line are recently launched. They are launched ~50 at a time into a low orbit and use thrusters to raise themselves up over the course of a few weeks or months. During that process they are all lined up in a row which slowly lengthens over time. As they reach operational altitude they separate into groups and each group spaces itself evenly around one orbit for even coverage.
Imagine a visualization of all debris and litter that’s on the ground. Low Earth Orbit is very clean by comparison. This visualization makes it seem impassable and treacherous.
Imagine if this was to scale and each of the satellites was a giant floating city the size of Tokyo or LA? I wonder how many centuries will pass before that becomes a reality.
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.
This looks extremely crowded - but reminds me of how apparently hard it was to find or bump into another ship crossing even a confined sea like the Med before sonar. With three dimensions here and more avoidance planning, even this level of space probably looks very empty still.
It is of course not to scale. You simply couldn't see any satellites unless looking at ridiculously small areas. Most of them measure a few meters at best.
I'm amazed how large satellites have become. They are larger than small countries, like Luxembourg, Cyprus, Trinidad, ... How do they get these huge satellites up in space? Unbelievable...
Neat. I wonder if this is solely generated from their array of distrbuted sensors, or if this is just another visualization tool using space-track.org's data.
Im on my phone but you could probably look in the network requests panel of your browsers developer tools to see if any request is sent to space-track.org.
Side note: does anyone know of a good tool / app for looking at things like that on iOS ?
I wonder how much light is blocked by this stuff floating around? Seems like there are parallel efforts to make atmospheric dust while this is already up there.
How would that work? A rocket launches into orbit an unmanned satellite capable of autonomously intercepting the orbit of debris in order to collect it and then deorbit itself? Seems extremely expensive for little benefit.
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.
Yeah, there's a lot of objects being rendered on screen. My GPU (3090 Ti) was running at about 41% while I was playing with the site. Amazing site, but definitely GPU intensive.
My GPU - an Intel 4600 integrated GPU in a 2014 laptop - kicked up to about 95% utilization while playing with the site. I suspect I was getting fewer details than you - mine was not silky smooth but still perfectly usable, at what I'd estimate to be about 20 FPS.
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!
Just curious ;-) Whom are you thanking in particular?
The web page authors? The browser programmers? The OS programmers? Perhaps the graphics driver programmers? HN? The OP? The readers of your comment?
Whoever is at fault. They are just putting the thanks out there. It is not their fault that those responsible have not equipped themselves with the proper receivers.
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.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Space is really, really big (the name fits!). The biggest Earth-orbiting satellites are a bit less than the size of a school bus (the biggest being something like KH-9 size) in terms of mass, somewhat bigger when it comes to things like parabolic dishes.
We worry about orbital debris because of the consequence of loss. There's a lot of room up there (not discounting everyone's concern).
I guess this is US only? The site is horribly broken upon loading. Only after using developer tools I discovered that all scripts and assets return 403 - CloudFront configured to block your country.
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.