Gabbard Diagram for Low Earth Orbit 1959-2021
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it to illustrate orbital debris evolution and how altitude determines how fast debris decays.
What it is
An animated Gabbard diagram of objects in low Earth orbit from 1959 to 2021, showing altitude over time. It highlights major debris-generating events and how low-altitude debris decays out of orbit.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2021 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Cites runnerup · 2021-07 · on “Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team”
Probably not. Even 500,000 sattelites would still leave more than enough space between them for whatever you want. The risk would be if many of them blew up or something, creating billions of tiny pieces of debris. In that scenario, we might just wait 5 years and then most of the debris will have burned up in the atmosphere. SpaceX satellites are around 550km attitude. If someone puts satellites higher than that, collision debris will last longer, the satellites' fuel will last longer so the satellites won't have to be replaced as often, but network latencies will be higher. Seems like 500-600km is the optimal zone for the primary constellations of internet satellites. Video showing decay of
Cites MichaelCollins · 2022-09 · on “FCC Approves 5 Year Satellite Deorbiting Rule”
[this video] "Gabbard Diagram for Low Earth Orbit 1959-2021" See how the stuff in the lower left corner speeds up towards the lower left corner? That's low flying debris falling out of space.
Cites xoa · 2023-07 · on “Starlink satellites are dodging objects in orbit thousands of times every month”
>Do a search for "atmospheric drag" or anything about orbital lifetimes, gabbard diagrams [0] or the like >nothing, instead it equates all constellations and satellites together as the same thing Yet another click bait crummy article, with the obligatory "concerned astronomers" emotional tug on top but no serious engagement. And "big numbers!!" but no sort of context on if or why it's a problem. It's so tiresome how this gets trotted out over and over again. SpaceX's approach isn't bad for debris risks, it's good! The absolute best possible fail safe solution for sats is to have them low enough that they will passively deorbit very quickly without continuous boosts, or even better VLEO orbit
Cites Heliosmaster · 2023-11 · on “Starship will attempt a launch this weekend”
generally when two satellites collide some debris can be shot at a higher orbit which will take forever (or will not) reenter atmosphere. See the scatterplot of debris for the Chinese collision test of 2000: [LINK] See this video for evolution of debris and altitude over time: [this video]