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Show HN: The story of space debris, made with WebGL for the Royal Institution

by stugrey on 12/8/15, 12:54 PM with 10 comments

  • by CapitalistCartr on 12/8/15, 10:18 PM

    NASA have a quartery newsletter on space debris called, appropriately enough, The Orbital Debris Quarterly News.

    http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter....

  • by gus_massa on 12/8/15, 1:13 PM

    (Just in case it's not obvious: Click the yellow link to see the animated visualization.)

    Each debris has a different color. What does it mean?

    Do the page download all the initial data and make a simulation or it download the positions periodically?

    There is a ring at high altitude. What is it's origin? Geocentric satellites? (I think there is another ring at medium altitude, but I'm not sure.)

    Does this show the satellites that are currently in use or only the unuseful debris? Can you add a button to show/hide them?

  • by gjem97 on 12/8/15, 8:33 PM

    It's a bit surprising to me that it's not made more clear that the individual pieces of debris are not to scale. That is, just glancing at the visualization (especially the early ones in the presentation that focus on low Earth orbit) would lead the viewer to believe that space is much more crowded than it actually is. This in turn would make the viewer believe that collisions are much more likely than they actually are.

  • by Cogito on 12/8/15, 10:22 PM

    FYI, this was broken behind my company proxy.

    I think the proxy was rewriting the "Content-Range" request header, which is used in the function (papaparse.js:533):

    function getFileSize(xhr) { var contentRange = xhr.getResponseHeader("Content-Range"); return parseInt(contentRange.substr(contentRange.lastIndexOf("/") + 1)); }

    I could work around this by using the "Content-Length" header instead, which was available.

    Once it was working, I thought it worked quite well, with only a little bit of stuttering and visual glitches detracting from the presentation, but those are probably on my end :)

    I have seen a at least one similar presentations before, so I wonder if you were involved in any other similar things, or have borrowed concepts from them?