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A Real-Time Map of All the Objects In Earth's Orbit

Posted by Soulskill on from the except-for-that-mickey-mantle-home-run dept.

rastos1 writes: It started as a passion project in April for 18-year-old James Yoder, an alum of FIRST Robotics, the high school robotics competition. He wanted to learn more about 3D graphics programming and WebGL, a JavaScript API. It's stuffin.space, a real-time, 3D-visualized map of all objects looping around Earth, from satellites to orbital trash. In total, stuffin.space tracks 150,000 objects. Type in a satellite name to scope out its altitude, figure out its age, group satellites by type, and so on.

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. A .space domain! by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I rarely post to Slashdot unless I have something to contribute, but this time I just have to say:

    WOW.

    1) I didn't know there was a .space domain.
    2) Holy moly that is beautiful.

  2. Re:Misconception about space "pollution" by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Of course.

    my point is that most of the people that are going to check will do so only to see how "polluted" space is.

    Which is... very.

    Would you stake your life on being able to run a Kerbal Space Program moon-landing mission without hitting any of the DEB (debris) objects? Would you stake your life on being able to run a KSP to launch something into a stable LEO that could loop around the planet 100 times without hitting any? How about a thousand times?

    Communications and navigation satellites - to say nothing of the ISS and its resupply missions - require orbits that never intersect any of the crap up there. And while obviously there are hundreds of miles between each item you see at any given time, sit and watch the display for a while and try to predict somewhere that's "safe".

    LEO is polluted, heavily. Space programs are mandated to be safe these days, with very little tolerated risk. Every GPS satellite or comms satellite we launch makes things significantly harder, and it's not a linear progression. Worse, the delta-V required to actually DO anything about this problem is hugely problematic as well. So we're screwing up our gateway to not-here, and doing it in a manner that makes it massively difficult to fix.

    Yes, lots of this will de-orbit. In decades, or longer.

    --
    "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."