
Show HN: The story of space debris, made with WebGL for the Royal Institution - stugrey
http://rigb.org/christmas-lectures/how-to-survive-in-space/a-place-called-space/7-space-debris-visualisation
======
CapitalistCartr
NASA have a quartery newsletter on space debris called, appropriately enough,
The Orbital Debris Quarterly News.

[http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter....](http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html)

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gus_massa
(Just in case it's not obvious: Click the yellow link to see the animated
visualization.)

Each debris has a different color. What does it mean?

Do the page download all the initial data and make a simulation or it download
the positions periodically?

There is a ring at high altitude. What is it's origin? Geocentric satellites?
(I think there is another ring at medium altitude, but I'm not sure.)

Does this show the satellites that are currently in use or only the unuseful
debris? Can you add a button to show/hide them?

~~~
stugrey
Author here,

The debris is coloured to match the descriptive text.

Each years data is loaded when the user gets to that part of the
visualisation.

The ring you see is indeed all of the satellites in geosynchronous orbit. You
can also see the orbits of many of the GNSS satellites in medium Earth orbit
if you stare hard enough for long enough!

This shows all objects (functioning and debris) in orbit at the time in
question.

~~~
placebo
Impressive, nice work :-)

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gjem97
It's a bit surprising to me that it's not made more clear that the individual
pieces of debris are not to scale. That is, just glancing at the visualization
(especially the early ones in the presentation that focus on low Earth orbit)
would lead the viewer to believe that space is much more crowded than it
actually is. This in turn would make the viewer believe that collisions are
much more likely than they actually are.

~~~
stugrey
Unfortunately, to show the Earth and the orbital positions to scale, it was
not possible to show the pieces of debris to scale.

~~~
neffy
Yes, sorry. The not-to-scale aspect meant it jumped the shark almost
immediately for me as well. As small as possible, following the initial
display of the object, might have conveyed the idea better - and that would
have made the Chinese explosion a little more fun.

~~~
DanBC
But see also the NASA visualisation on the NASA orbital debris site:
[http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/](http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/)

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Cogito
FYI, this was broken behind my company proxy.

I _think_ the proxy was rewriting the "Content-Range" request header, which is
used in the function (papaparse.js:533):

 _function getFileSize(xhr) { var contentRange = xhr.getResponseHeader(
"Content-Range"); return
parseInt(contentRange.substr(contentRange.lastIndexOf("/") + 1)); }_

I could work around this by using the "Content-Length" header instead, which
was available.

Once it was working, I thought it worked quite well, with only a little bit of
stuttering and visual glitches detracting from the presentation, but those are
probably on my end :)

I have seen a at least one similar presentations before, so I wonder if you
were involved in any other similar things, or have borrowed concepts from
them?

