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Comment by jcwayne | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

And that's before you add oceans and horizontal planes...

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.

I otherwise totally agree with your point.

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.

Those news stories would be a lot less interesting with a black picture of space with a footnote that the satellites are there, just too small to see.

It would be nice to have a selector for the scale level of the satellites, perhaps x1000, x100, x10 and x1.

And perhaps a density map too.

I would love to see a visualization comparing orbital traffic/debris with marine traffic.

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