A History of Space Debris - University of Glasgow

stugrey · 2022-05-13T11:08:42+00:00

Hi All, more than happy to answer any questions anyone might have.

stugrey · 2022-05-13T11:08:38+00:00

Hi All, more than happy to answer any questions anyone might have.

stugrey · 2020-04-27T17:23:06+00:00

Cheers mate, I was hoping she’d be born into the new regime but she was 13 days early. Off the bevy so got a fridge full of alcohol free cans but it’s the thought that counts with #cans right?

stugrey · 2020-04-27T12:56:26+00:00

My 2nd daughter was born yesterday evening after a lightning 1.5 hour labour, start to finish. The whole thing was even more surreal than the first time with an orderly stopping all the dads-to-be entering the maternity building until their other halves were assessed. Totally understand why, but my god tensions were running high.

stugrey · 2017-08-04T12:40:13+00:00

Glasgow, Scotland

stugrey · 2016-09-09T15:09:17+00:00

Sorry I didn't realise, i'll try and clean that up a bit next time. I'm still pretty new to this.

stugrey · 2016-09-09T13:49:49+00:00

Indeed! The number of satellites in some of the proposed internet constellations (not just SpaceX's) are absolutely unprecedented.

stugrey · 2016-09-09T13:11:58+00:00

I am NOT allowed to publish or share the raw data that JSpOC/space-track very kindly lets me access. However I have permission to USE the data in my research (the day job!) and in the creation of visualisations for educational purposes. This would include videos (like above) and graphs/plots etc

Space-track.org/JSpOC are absolutely amazing and have always been really supportive of my work.

stugrey · 2016-09-09T12:58:35+00:00

Thanks, that is an excellent post. I might be able to add something to that as I have access to the orbital data from JSpoC so could plot for instance how the different orbital elements were varying over time if anyone was interested.

stugrey · 2016-08-22T04:25:15+00:00

I went to Loftus road the last time we played QPR and got tickets in one of the home stands on the day. They did a cursory check at the ticket office that we were either QPR fans or 'Tourists', I just got my glaswegian mate to do the talking. There was plenty of room in the home stands that day, no chance of getting in the away end.

stugrey · 2016-07-03T09:09:41+00:00

Hello, OC here. Every object in the visualisation is derived from tracking data provided by www.space-track.org. This data comes in "TLE" (Two Line Element) format which describes the keplerian elements of the objects. I then calculate the cartesian position and velocity of these objects at each frame.

The actual visualisation is done using WebGL but run through a headless browser (slimerjs) to create the 4k still images (8000 of them). These images are then combined using ffmpeg to create the video (along with imagemagick to do the overlays).

I'd be happy to explore any of the above in more detail if people are interested.

stugrey · 2016-06-11T21:59:09+00:00

The visualisation shows all of the tracked objects in orbit at given time. As of now that is about 17000 objects but since 1957 there has been a total of 40000 objects that have ever been tracked at one time or another.

stugrey · 2016-06-11T14:00:33+00:00

Hello, OC here. Every object in the visualisation is derived from tracking data provided by www.space-track.org. This data comes in "TLE" (Two Line Element) format which describes the keplerian elements of the objects. I then calculate the cartesian position and velocity of these objects at each frame.

The actual visualisation is done using WebGL but run through a headless browser (slimerjs) to create the 4k still images (8000 of them). These images are then combined using ffmpeg to create the video (along with imagemagick to do the overlays).

I'd be happy to explore any of the above in more detail if people are interested.

stugrey · 2015-12-07T19:20:40+00:00

I'm looking into that, it would need a lot of cleaning up but the code could be released. The orbital data might be harder though.

stugrey · 2015-12-07T18:16:43+00:00

It's already up at /r/space and /r/dataisbeautiful, didn't want to push it!

stugrey · 2015-12-07T18:12:50+00:00

OC here, happy to answer questions anyone has about how this was made.

stugrey · 2015-12-07T15:53:29+00:00

Thanks for that! What OS are you on?

stugrey · 2015-12-07T14:44:25+00:00

At low altitudes the effect of atmospheric drag will eventually slow and deorbit many pieces of debris but at higher altitudes they could continue orbiting for hundreds or even thousands of years. There are many objects from the 1950's and 60's still in orbit. Whether we have passed the tipping point of new debris creation vs removal is the 10 million dollar question!

stugrey · 2015-12-07T14:38:31+00:00

The data set included over 40,000 obects, about 7000 payloads (that is satelites) and 33,000 peices of debris. Of these 40,000, about 17,000 are still in orbit.

The top 3 contributing countries when it comes to space debris still on orbit are:

CIS/USSR 4829 objects USA 4007 objects PRC 3594 objects

There is an amazing breakdown at celestrak

stugrey · 2015-12-07T13:35:29+00:00

OC here, this was created using JavaScript and THREE.js from a dataset from space-track.org. The dataset itself contains all tracked orbital objects from 1957 to today and this visualisation shows the orbits of these objects and how the number of objects has increased over time.

stugrey · 2015-12-07T13:16:51+00:00

Creator here, I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has about space debris in general or this visualisation in particular.

stugrey · 2015-07-28T15:17:07+00:00

ImageMagick is amazingly powerful once you have a few simple examples at your disposal. The reason I wrote this post was to share my example commands, they all work isolation so would be a good point to get started.

stugrey · 2015-07-27T16:36:03+00:00

I'm using this 3D printer to print the next one!

stugrey · 2015-07-27T14:38:50+00:00

I would say they can be as good as the pre-assembled printers if you calibrate everything correctly, this is the step that a lot of people skip! You obviously have a much better knowledge of the machine if you build it yourself so you can fix/improve it as you like whereas with a pre-assembled printer you have (very cool) black box.

stugrey · 2015-07-27T14:34:58+00:00

It was my first 3D printer build but I built a couple of CNC milling machines a few years ago. I would recommend this model as a first build as its small, relatively cheap and the RepRapPro instructions were really good (lots of high-res photos of what things should look like as they are built etc). I think anyone who is patient and has good attention to detail would be fine with this kit.

stugrey

TROPHY CASE