hello it's scott manley here with a 360
video designed to put you inside the
data the viewpoint is a desert far from
humans and if you look up or point the
camera up using the controls you should
be able to see a sky full of stars and
if you look in the right direction
you might see a bright spot moving
that's the International Space Station
passing overhead is one of the brightest
objects in the sky brighter even than
Venus but it's just one of many objects
and I want to show you just how many
satellites are up there so I'm going to
make them all visible to your naked eyes
just look around and you should be able
to see dozens of satellites thanks to
the superhuman vision that I've bestowed
upon you this is from a database of over
2,000 active satellites ranging from
experimental cube satellites and low
Earth orbit to giant communication
satellites in geostationary orbit you
can figure out which way is south by
looking for the rainbow shaped arc of
geostationary objects that are sitting
still since I placed the viewer in
California you can see that the arc gets
broken up on the right side that's
because geostationary satellites like to
be located over countries rather than
the empty Pacific Ocean how about we
highlight the weather satellites there's
a couple of those visible in
geostationary orbit
but highlighting the communication
satellite shows us a lot more of those
two really sure that we're geostationary
we can actually speed time up and make
things move faster
surely wobble a little but they don't
move much especially compared to those
in low-earth orbit between low-earth
orbit and geostationary orbit we find a
lot of navigation satellites like GPS or
the European Galileo system or the
Russian GLONASS and the Chinese bedew
Network
but most of the objects flying by
quickly are in low-earth orbit so in
this orbit there's things like
communication networks such as iridium
ARB comm StarLink and various others and
low-earth orbit is a fantastic place to
get information on the surface of the
earth so here we also find lots of earth
monitoring spacecraft including hundreds
of Dove Cube sets that image the earth
on a daily basis space is also important
for military operations and in low-earth
orbit there are a number of military
satellites not all of these actually
officially report their locations but
amateur satellite trackers can follow
them nevertheless and since we're
talking about military activities in
space I've highlighted a number of
pieces of space debris that are the
result of anti-satellite weapon tests in
the last 20 years or so after a
satellite is destroyed it remains in
orbit indeed any debris tends to stay in
orbit so here we've heilige a total of
15,000 pieces of extra space debris on
top of the 2,400 or so actual active
satellites and every single one of these
is a potential threat to another
satellite these objects are anything
from metre-long boosters used to put as
satellites into their final orbit down
to objects a few centimeters are cross--
which are perhaps fragments are
discarded pieces of hardware used in the
launch process and so this is what you
could see if you could see every single
object in orbit around the earth and
this number could double in coming
decades as more and more communication
satellites get launched into low Earth
orbit
I'm Scott Manley fly safe
you
[Music]
you