Visualization of objects in orbit around the Earth

[ChrisSmolinski]

http://stuffin.space

[homebrew]

The is awesome (and terrifying)! Thanks for sharing!

[ByteBORG]

Awesome link!

That's a lot of traffic to navigate to get into space!

[Oliver]

A few debris facts:

• NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility spent 5.7 years in a low Earth orbit to help analyze the risk from debris. Over 20,000 impacts have been documented.
• Critical surfaces on the Space Shuttle were examined for debris after every flight.
• Even a salt-sized grain hitting the space shuttle creates orbital debris
• The most heavily shielded spacecraft ever flown, International Space Station changes its flight path if it is expected to come within a few miles of a large piece of debris. Such course corrections happen about once a year.
• The US Vanguard 1 satellite, launched in 1958, is the oldest artificial satellite still circling the Earth, despite its low orbit.
• More than 100 trillion artificial objects smaller than one-hundred-thousandth of an inch (1 micron) could circle the globe.
• NASA was the first space agency to issue guidelines for orbital debris mitigation in 1995.

Also a pretty cool site for debris tracking:
http://satellitedebris.net/whatsup/whatsup.htm

[sat_dxer]

• The US Vanguard 1 satellite, launched in 1958, is the oldest artificial satellite still circling the Earth, despite its low orbit.

"The three stage launch vehicle placed Vanguard into a 654 x 3969 km 134.2 minute orbit inclined at 34.25 degrees. Original estimates had the orbit lasting for 2000 years, but it was discovered that solar radiation pressure and atmospheric drag during high levels of solar activity produced significant perturbations in the perigee height of the satellite, which caused a significant decrease in its expected lifetime to only about 240 years." [1] http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov

[skeezix]

Ha.

When I saw the link, I thought another sat tracker. Went to it and just about had a stroke when I first saw the map.

[Ct Yankee]

Last night while at a stargazing event hosted by a local astronomical society, an iridium satellite was pointed out to me.  I then got the entire history of the name (was to be 77, not 66 or 67) and current usage.  I was also told about this website: http://heavens-above.com