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xorfish

What does visible from space mean?

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Google map link :

https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D9%85%D8%AD%D8%B7%D8%A9+%...

Actually if you zoom out enough, it disappears...

That's cool... it is as if it was just crudely patched in there by the maps team

Wonder how they deal with dust

> To combat the latter [i.e. dust], employees will clean all the panels at Benban once or twice a month by passing by in specialized tractors equipped with brushes

Different photos/dates at different zoom levels/positions

it's appearing/disappearing suddenly between two levels of zoom, there must a switch of images library that were taken before/after the start of the construction.

If you look at the copyrights at the bottom of the page that's exactly what's happening. It switches from "Maxar technologies/CNES/Airbus" to "Landsat".

This is actually a somewhat normal occurrence and you encounter it frequently enough. Different zoom levels sometimes correspond to different sources of imagery, sometimes months or years apart.

My home still disappears at certain zoom levels, and I see the construction site instead - it was built in 2016.

I understand new high resolution data not being available for all areas. But generally I would have expected them to default to either the newer or a downscaled higher resolution source.

The zoomed-out levels also have a ©2019 and not showing any signs of solar, while first modules went online spring 2018 [0]. Probably no big deal for google maps, but there might not have gone everything as intended, either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benban_Solar_Park

What is really amazing (to me at least) is how small the site looks when you zoom out a bit.

Lots of land there... Seems ideal for further development and exporting energy?

> Seems ideal for further development and exporting energy?

Seems so, yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

"visible from space" to me means visible with a naked eye to an astronaut orbiting earth.

This seems like it will likely meet that definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_structures_visible_...

Something 100-200 meters across is visible as a spec from low orbit. A square kilometer is reasonably easy to see. There's an estimate on wikipedia that to read text from the ISS the letters would need to be 2km tall.

This solar park is 37 square kilometers in almost a square. Well over all those thresholds.

I always forget how close space is. The ISS is only 400 km up, they actually only see 3% of the Earth's surface.

> Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away—I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

It's important to note that "barely space, by consensus" and "able to orbit properly" are significantly different heights.

100km is where there's barely too little air to keep a plane up, and you have to be moving at orbital speeds. But you still need a lot of constant thrust to stay up there.

Even at 200km, your average object will fall out of orbit in a day.

At 300km you're reasonably stable, with about a month of orbit life if you don't boost.

At 400km you find the ISS, where orbit life is somewhere around a year.

There are a lot of milestones between 50km and 600km where you could pick any one and make a reasonable argument that it's the edge of space.

> 10cm

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