
Every single satellite orbiting Earth, in a single image - act9
https://news.yahoo.com/every-single-satellite-orbiting-earth-single-image-171639687.html
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bwp
Higher resolution images: [http://www.universetoday.com/13587/space-debris-
illustrated-...](http://www.universetoday.com/13587/space-debris-illustrated-
the-problem-in-pictures/)

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aasarava
My first thought was wow! My second thought was, wait a minute...

The image certainly shows there are a lot of satellites floating around Earth.
But "crowded" is a relative term. There are many, many miles of space between
those satellites.

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jessriedel
Yep. I did a back of the envelope calculation once, and I think it was
something like a thousand cubic miles for every satellite in low Earth orbit.

Alaska would look overwhelmingly crowded too if you drew even a tiny fraction
of the population as small visible people on the map.

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yeukhon
This is astonishing, especially after the movie _Gravity_. I didn't know we
have so many satellites up there. One thing that always keeps me alert is the
amount of space litter. My friend said _Gravity_ makes him lost interest in
space travel and this image has stopped me ever wanting to go up there.
Despite the distance between satellite, they eventually will become useless
and many are destroyed in the space due to security reason.

Kudos to people who work on space mission, getting the right window and right
path precisely is really difficult given the amount of litter and traffic we
have right now...

I would be interested in getting a map labels the ownership of each satellite
and what each of them does. I suspect there are clusters, based on country and
companies. I'd like to see an interactive map like Google Map and Google Earth
looking at Earth and satellites.

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Raticide
* if every satellite was 10,000 times bigger than it really is.

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nephyrin
This is a link to a yahoo news scrape of a bgr.com story about a tweet about a
picture. Seriously?

[https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/439577697606701056](https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/439577697606701056)

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imranq
Totally nonsense picture, sure there are satellites in the sky, most of them
approaching obsolescence, but satellites scaled to become naval carriers?

Satellites are only going to get smaller and smaller, check out Skybox
Imaging.

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seanfisher
Totally to scale, right. Satellites are the size of countries now.

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turnip1979
I am going to say the same thing in a different way:

"The satellites in the image are not to scale, and this makes the image
misleading."

Was that so hard?

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rurounijones
Didn't realise we have put that many satellites into orbit.

If you had asked me out of the blue how many sats humans had launched I would
have guessed a couple of hundred.

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webwielder
If humans are good at anything, it's litter.

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BMarkmann
Would be interesting to see in an animation.

