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Stuff in Space – realtime 3D map of objects in Earth's orbit

223 points| quakeguy | 8 years ago |stuffin.space | reply

63 comments

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[+] jolmg|8 years ago|reply
Reminds me of the anime Planetes, about a group of space garbage collectors. In the opening scene, you're shown an innocuous looking screw floating in orbit for something like 10 seconds, and then suddenly a traveling ship appears from the distance, and the screw goes straight through like a bullet, causing all the passengers to die. I don't know how realistic that was, but it really set the tone for the importance of the characters' job in keeping the orbits clean.
[+] spodek|8 years ago|reply
Comments here seem to agree there is too much junk in space, it's out of control, and a problem.

It's nothing compared to the amount of junk on the ground and in the oceans. Let's also work on lowering that, I propose starting with each of us -- including you -- refusing disposable stuff and acquiring less stuff in general.

[+] cwal37|8 years ago|reply
+1

It's the forgotten point of reduce, reuse, recycle. People are almost always surprised when I mention that it's a ranked list, heading towards less efficacy. You might be proud of recycling, but it's the low hanging and least useful choice. Simply not using things or re-using sturdier goods is far and away the better choice in terms of waste.

[+] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
Great visualization!

I must say, I love the "Find all objects from this launch..." option. You can learn so much.

For instance, I've clicked on some random satellite in the GEO band, and viewed all objects from its launch:

https://i.imgur.com/tknQtDk.png

The closest object to Earth is a tank, which suggests a high-inclination launch. I guess Baikonur?

Next, you see a band of debris on less-inclined orbits. Those are close together, suggesting maybe fairings, or remnants of explosive stage separation? Stuff in space will drift apart like that, if you give it a slight push.

And lastly, in GEO band, is the satellite itself.

[+] greglindahl|8 years ago|reply
Presumably you picked a launch where the Briz, which is a tug stage that the Russians use for Proton launches to GTO, blew up after releasing the satellite in GTO. That's not supposed to happen, but at least it results in debris with a low perigee that will decay in < 25 years, maybe a lot faster.

Briz also drops a fuel tank early on.

Fairings are dropped while sub-orbital. India put one in orbit last year, but not intentionally.

[+] orbital-decay|8 years ago|reply
Yeah Breeze-M is a Proton upper stage, which means a Baikonur launch. Unrelated fact: due to Baikonur high launch inclinations it's cheaper (in terms of dV) to circumnavigate the Moon when launching stuff into GEO than to change the inclination at the insertion burn. It's just not practical to do so, because the stage lifetime is limited.
[+] etrautmann|8 years ago|reply
This is an unbelievably well done visualization. Really helps one understand the degree of problematic space junk, though I don't have much of an intuition for collision probabilities.
[+] orbital-decay|8 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that dot sizes are hugely exaggerated. Additionally, it's hard to see how the slow moving dots can collide, this visualization can only show the general sense of "how much stuff there is in orbit", which can be entirely misleading and doesn't reflect the real problem.

To be helpful in understanding the problem, it should probably include collision probabilities and relative velocities involved. It will be immediately ovious that, for example, GEO is absolutely safe despite having quite a bunch of "dots", and the most dangerous place is 15 and 14 orbits per day Sun-syhchronous orbits, where the most remote sensing stuff lives.

[+] TheRealPomax|8 years ago|reply
arbitrary motion collision is almost zero, the dots are several orders of magnitude larger than proper scale would be. But still "high enough to require taking into account when putting something else into orbit".
[+] golergka|8 years ago|reply
Isn't most junk in LEO going to burn in the atmosphere in a short time if left to it's own devices?
[+] ChrisLeoLabs|8 years ago|reply
LeoLabs offers data and services around low earth orbit objects, and has an api for data:

Visualization: https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

LEO Catalog Pages: https://platform.leolabs.space/catalog/L335

[+] fludlight|8 years ago|reply
The visualization shows interesting behavior at the poles. Objects seemingly spinning around the Arctic and Antarctic. Is that an artifact of rendering or do they actually behave that way?
[+] RobertRoberts|8 years ago|reply
Is it not reasonable to put a laser on a satellite with targeting systems to shoot some of this stuff? It seems like that would be ideal, no ammo needed, no super big nets or propellant (or less anyways).

If you target a bigger piece on one side it could cause a reaction to push it towards earth. If it's a small piece, it may disintegrate it. If it's spinning, it may alter it's orbit to eventually fall, etc...

Is this an unreasonable concept? I know this stuff is hard to find, but here we have a data showing we know where some of it is, and add some radar/lidar/whatever-dar to the satelite and get it a shootin. And no, I don't think a spacebased laser for shooting junk could harm anything planetside.

[+] petre|8 years ago|reply
Impractical and it only makes matters worse since it can turn bigger debris into multiple smaller ones. Rather than shoot stuff with a laser, why not use a vehicle that generates a magnetic field and at least collects feromagnetic debris in one place. Then throw the whole thing into the atmosphere to burn and crash in an unpopulated area.
[+] losteric|8 years ago|reply
Energy is the bottleneck. Lasers don't provide that much kinetic energy... so you're either briefly firing a powerful laser or continuously firing a small laser. The other energy cost is movement, I don't know how often the satellite would have to move to find debris but the larger satellite has more mass while the smaller one has to expend energy to match debris orbits.

Works in theory, but it seems impractical to me.

[+] GCU-Empiricist|8 years ago|reply
That might e taken as a violation of UN Space treaty. Depends on how weapons of mass destruction is defined in the treaty.
[+] bassman9000|8 years ago|reply
Check the Iridium 33 group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

[+] musha68k|8 years ago|reply
Wow: “A small piece of Cosmos 2251 satellite debris safely passed by the International Space Station at 2:38 a.m. EDT, Saturday, March 24, 2012. As a precaution, the six crew members on board the orbiting complex took refuge inside the two docked Soyuz rendezvous spacecraft until the debris had passed.”
[+] strainer|8 years ago|reply
I could not translate the data for the real objects so I mocked up one of these for my physics project here:

https://strainer.github.io/fancy#1

The satellites are in orbit, their speeds should be quite accurate, the rate of time can be adjusted and keys are displayed on screen for zooming.

[+] gonesilent|8 years ago|reply
Good opportunity here to make a game collecting space junk. Get kids thinking about such problems now. Maybe a KSP plug-in.
[+] ilugaslifk|8 years ago|reply
KSP's stock career mode does have missions involving retrieving individual pieces of debris. Though it's not framed or incentivized as "removing space junk" in exactly the way you mean.

There's also an anime series about space junk, 'Planetes' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes) -- which does the best job I've seen in any visual media of getting orbital mechanics right, and is generally somewhere between 'The Expanse' and 'Seveneves' on the scale of sci-fi "hardness". And, as far as anime goes, is relatively light enough on "anime bullshit" to be watchable even if you're normally not into that.

[+] z3t4|8 years ago|reply
Is there a convention about in what direction you should put satellites ? I know the space is crazy big and it's unlikely you will front-collide with a satellite going the opposite direction. But it would also be crazy to collide with another object at 7,000 m/s
[+] blauditore|8 years ago|reply
I guess most are in the same direction as earth rotation for practical reasons: Relative velocity to the surface is lower, which probably makes communication easier and requires less energy for launches (as you get a "boost" from earth).
[+] caf|8 years ago|reply
Everyone tends to launch towards the East because you need less delta-V to get into orbit that way.
[+] Assossa|8 years ago|reply
Search for "SES 10" or "2017-017A" if you want to find the Tesla Roadster.
[+] thread_id|8 years ago|reply
Brilliant!!! Absolutely brilliant!!! So much detail and functionality. Recognition to James Yoder for this amazing product!! But also consider what this represents: From 1957 to now... how much our world has changed.
[+] OldArrow|8 years ago|reply
What are yellow dots ? Object A , Object B
[+] tyldum|8 years ago|reply
Temporary names for recently launched objects pending final classification.
[+] aetherspawn|8 years ago|reply
I had no idea there was so much junk above me.