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by beklein 18 days ago
To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).

A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
2 comments
SiempreViernes 17 days ago
There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:

> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.

https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

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beklein 17 days ago
Thanks for sharing the paper, it seems my intuition on size was bad but also my intuition on max satellite density for LEO was wrong.
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webdoodle 17 days ago
Whether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1.

Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch.

Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.

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