Earth-orbiting Satellites

About

Each white dot represents a satellite orbiting Earth.

Number of satellites shown =

Who they belong to:

Country	Number of Satellites	%
USA	8,440	62.0%
Russia	1,580	11.6%
China	1,021	7.5%
UK	717	5.3%
Japan	200	1.5%
Other	1,669	12.1%

Furthest distance from satellite to Earth's surface = 480,762 km

↪ The NASA satellite Explorer 33 was supposed to be the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the Moon, but the 2nd stage accelerated too rapidly. Mission planners adopted an alternate mission and put the spacecraft into a highly elliptical Earth orbit allowing it to come within around 35,000 km of the Moon.

Closest distance from satellite to Earth's surface = 172 km

↪ A satellite called Molniya 1-62 that comes from a series of Russian satellites named after their highly elliptical orbits, this one extending out to 35,918 km.

Date information:

Launch Date Range	Number of Satellites
2024 (until Nov 21)	2,229
2023	2,676
2022	2,036
2021	1,368
2020	829
2010-2020	1,406
2000-2010	671
1990-2000	845
1980-1990	763
1970-1980	548
1958-1970	256

This visualization is to scale.

Note on Orbits:
Only orbits < 50,000 km are shown, 48 satellites are out of this range.
Satellite orbit radii are the average of the perigee and apogee altitudes.

Apogee (perigee) is the point in the orbit where the satellite is furthest (closest) to the center of mass of the system. This serves as a decent estimate since most orbits are approximately spherical.

Only 616 satellites have orbits that are not very spherical, with an eccentricity > 0.1. Eccentricity can be seen as how elliptical the orbit is, and is defined as:

ε =

Apogee - Perigee

Apogee + Perigee

For these satellites, an average is not a great approximation (since the distance from Earth can vary dramatically throughout a single orbit), but it was taken for the sake of displaying the entire data set here.

How this was made:
Satellite data from CelesTrak Satellite Catalog (accessed Nov 21, 2024). Further info from ESA and NASA. Visualization done using a Python script to analyze and clean the data, and D3.js to visualize it.
© 2024 Alex Lascelles. All rights reserved.

Space Debris

This visualization shows only active and inactive satellites. It doesn't account for space debris — pieces of matter that have broken free from spacecraft, or have been dispersed after collisions such as the 2009 collision between Russian-operated Cosmos 2251 and US-operated Iridium 33 communications satellites or explosions such as the Chinese anti-satellite weapons test on Fengyun-1C in 2007.

ESA models estimate that there are:

29,000 debris larger than 10 cm

↪ Collision would mean catastrophic fragmentation of a typical satellite.

670,000 debris larger than 1 cm

↪ Collision would likely disable a spacecraft and penetrate the ISS shields.

170,000,000 debris larger than 1 mm

↪ Collisions could destroy sub-systems on board a spacecraft.

Debris can move at up to 18,000 mph, almost seven times faster than a bullet!