Keep Track: 3D Satellite Toolkit | Hacker News Reader

Keep Track: 3D Satellite Toolkit

app.keeptrack.space

180 pointsjonbaer36 comments

There are a few iterations of this, I'm personally partial to https://www.satcat.com/globe bc of all the other data available on site

Completely agree that their data graphs are second to none. Celestrak used to be the standard for these kind of charts but Kayhan is more intuitive. We have different market space. Their satcat tool (great name) is for viewing singular things in the catalog. I focus on showing relational data between sensors and multiple satellites which isn't offered outside of AGI's STK to my knowledge.

Nice concept! I only find it unintuitive to navigate, with button panel of always truncated buttons looking strange, quasi-permanent (requires action or stays there forever) and plenty error messages that I am using it wrong ('select something first!'), overly eager tooltips everywhere, with amusement centric but impractical zoomed animation on click that is not obvious how to reverse. It must be somewhere, the whole thing looks rich in functions, but I lost interest in the tiring entertainment centric approach before finding it.

I don't know what controls are, but is it by chance similar to meshlab? The controls for it were quite good for a desktop 3D navigator

Keyboard controls documentation: https://docs.keeptrack.space/basic-tut/keyboard-shortcuts/

I mirrored Kerbal Space Program's controls where it made sense, but for the most part they are original controls that grew organically over time.

What are all those Unknown JSC Vimpel objects in that one well-defined orbit between LEO and geostationary?

Two separate breakups that have been reported by Russians. Given the age and lack of regular tracking I have them listed as a very low confidence on the accuracy of the exact current location.

Neat! It's very cool to see what appears to be the 'hoop' formed by all the geosync satellites. Yet then there appears to be a 'cylinder' that contains the hoop whose axis is slightly off the hoop's access. Any idea what that represents? By maintaining the same distance from Earth as the geosyncs, they would seem to be synchronous with a particular longitude, but would rise up & down latitude above & below the equator with every revolution (i.e. onr full cycle per day).

Geostationary satellites are required to maintain their longitude (it's a license requirement to get their assigned orbital slot), but not their inclination. Sometimes operators will let the inclination drift a bit to save fuel.

Obviously it's a tradeoff, since if you let the inclination change to a non-zero value the satellite will move around in the sky. After a certain point it becomes unsustainable because it will start to drift outside the receiving beam of your customer's antennas.

All soundng very reasonabke so far, thank you - yet why is the overall cylinder at an incline? If as you describe, why wouldn't the choice of inclination be relatively random across the entire population of only-somewhat-geosync satellites? i.e. why isn't the cylinder satellate constellation centered (and tberefore coaxial) about the true geosync hoop?

The dead satellites sit at roughly 0 deg inclination initially and then the moon causes their inclination to shift. Depending on where the moon is in its orbit relative to the satellite it can pull the argument of perigee (lowest point) in different directions. The end result is that the inclinations are all roughly between 0-20 degrees but they all have different RAAN and argument of perigees.

Brilliant. As a result I'm reading up on graveyard orbits and end-of-life perturbations from various celestial sources. Also, this gem, whose longitude values roughly correspond to what I'm seeing:

last line of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit#Geostatio... :

"Geostationary satellites will also tend to drift around one of two stable longitudes of 75° and 255° without station keeping.[21]"

It cites SMAD, which on its face is more than good enough for me, but since I don't have a copy handy, it would still be interesting to know why those meridians would represent particularly attractive ones to drift into.

*Dead* satellites are supposed to be boosted into a graveyard orbit so they don't clutter up the neighbourhood for everyone else. Of course if it just fails, and can't be commanded there's not much anyone can do, but that's relatively rare. Most will be drifting at a pretty good clip, +100 km or more above geosynch.

I never expected there to be so many satellites orbiting Earth. It feels like we've cluttered space with all these objects.

Only appears that way because of the size of the icons representing them (which at the base zoom level are kilometers wide). If it was drawn at real scale the objects would be insignificant.

At the same time, it appears that you could load all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit onto a single small container ship.

That is the objects that are big enough for us to track somewhat reliably (10cm+). Based on models produced by ESA's space debris office, it is estimated that there are 1 million objects between 1-10cm and an 130 million objects between 1mm to 1cm.

Awesome!

I noticed that there is another much-used orbit apart from the round, earth-centered Geostationary Orbit, which is smaller, more elliptical, off-axis and tilted.

It may be the Molniya Orbit [0] which is "is a type of satellite orbit designed to provide communications and remote sensing coverage over high latitudes [...] The name comes from the Molniya satellites, a series of Soviet/Russian civilian and military communications satellites which have used this type of orbit since the mid-1960s."

Can anyone confirm this?

It appears to be full of JSC Vimpel satellites, which is "a Russian defense industry leader" [1], but from randomly clicking on the objects many are just debris.

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

[1] https://macvympel.ru/en/about/

I believe what you are probably looking at (I'm having trouble loading it) is probably debris in the Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO).

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

Edit: I believe that you are looking at a group of debris that is in an orbit close to GTO. This response [1] has a more detailed answer.

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48911/what-events-...

Would be awesome to see the source for this tool! Also, I've always been curious how you get applications like this to be performant at higher resolutions without using GPUs or other graphics tricks.

This is an open-source AGPL project: https://github.com/thkruz/keeptrack.space It is using your GPU. The performance is the combination of web workers, separating the position buffers from the rest of the satellite data, and not using any frameworks. That last one makes it run really smooth, but means I am constantly trying to solve problems that are already solved on threejs - camera controls for example.

Very cool. Appreciate the comments for the mesh functions in the source code...I've played around with photogrammetry but never took the time to appreciate how the 3D polygon logic worked at a low level (AliceVision).

And the UI is impressive but somewhat overwhelming. Could use a UI tool to help better manage the pitch\yaw\roll of the globe or individual vehicles\sensors (unless one already exists and I just missed it).

I like the idea of a UI menu for controlling the camera - I will add it to the to-do list.

Left click and drag to rotate pitch/yaw around the earth. Hold shift to make it move slower. Middle mouse click and drag to rotate the camera's pitch and yaw. Control + right click and drag to pan up/down/left/right.

Common complaint is that the UI is overwhelming. I am open to suggestions. I am thinking about building a separate subdomain that disables many of the advanced features by default to make it feel less daunting.

There are a lot of users with very different needs, so I haven't come up with a good way to onboard new users without making this look like every other globe with dots. There is documentation https://docs.keeptrack.space/

A user interface suggestion: I tried using the 'Find Satellite' option and manually scrolling through all the options in the drop down menu was a little tedious. Maybe allow a filter by typing the first couple of letters?

Also, what are the US GPS satellites listed under? I saw Beidou, GLONASS, and Galileo but I couldn't find the GPS satellites.

Ah got it, there was a 'Constellation' option to find the GPS sats.

The GPS satellites bus is listed under GPS, GPS II, GPS IIA, GPS IIF, and GPS IIR. It looks like a bug that the Payload isn't showing up. I see one as GPS SVN 10. I may be only showing payloads where there are at least 2 with the same name - otherwise there would be a dropdown that is 30,000 long.

Love your suggestion to improve the search feature to be more like the main search dropdown. Adding it to the list of to-dos on the github issues.

Once you understand all the gray points are debris it makes more sense (header > layer icon)

Impressed how many of them are already there. Also interesting: https://science.nasa.gov/eyes/

If you scroll down on the option, you can launch missile attacks and see its trajectory.

This is so amazing! Just a few fixes in the UX and it would be even better than satvis.

Anything specific? Please throw your requests here or open an issue on github (https://github.com/thkruz/keeptrack.space/issues) and I will try to get them implemented.

There is a feature to launch ICMBs from Russia at Washington DC?

Want to use this with more layers of data

Can you elaborate on what you have on mind? Depending on what you are looking for, I can add it to the to-do list.

Reminds me of Wall-E.

So much trash!

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