Skip to main content

Visualize satellite orbits in 3 Dimension with J-Track 3D

Since the launch of the first satellite, the Sputnik on 4 October 1957, mankind have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit. Out of these only about 900 satellites are operational and the rest are pure junk. Earlier this year, The European Space Operations Centre released some startling computer generated images highlighting the gravity of the situation.

space-debris

Even without all the space debris, the 900 odd functioning satellites themselves create a crowd around the earth. You can visualize this with NASA's J-Track 3-D, a Java based program that runs in your browser and which pulls information from a database to plot the positions of the satellites in a 3 dimensional space. You can use your mouse to move the map around, zoom in and out of it and track the orbits of individual satellites.

Jtrack

As you can see, it's a mess. The well populated ring around the earth are the geostationary satellites at about 36,000 km above earth. The fuzzy cloud nearer to earth are Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that zoom around the earth at approximately 27,400 km/hr. J-Track 3-D's plot is real time, so you can actually see the satellites change position every few seconds.

[via AppScout]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

69 alternatives to the default Facebook profile picture

If you have changed the default Facebook profile picture and uploaded your own, it’s fine. But if not, then why not replace that boring picture of the guy with a wisp of hair sticking out of his head with something different and funny?

How to remove watermark from an image or picture

A watermark is any recognizable text, logo or pattern that appears over an image to identify the owner of the image and generally used to prevent unauthorized reuse of the image. Watermarks are usually transparent and can be difficult to remove. The difficulty or ease of removal depends on the content of the image and the position, color, size etc of the watermark.