The small central sphere represents Earth. The grid is its equatorial plane, and the cyan line is a satellite orbit. The dashed part lies south of that plane. The white dot marks the northward crossing; the magenta ring marks the closest approach. These markers can coincide for some settings.

This explorer holds orbit size and eccentricity fixed (e = 0.35) so you can focus on orientation. The satellite follows Kepler timing, compressed to one circuit every 18 seconds. Earth and the spacecraft are symbols, not to scale. The reference direction is a fixed illustrative axis; this is not a live sky view.