Satellites, live
Where they are right now: every object of a few public catalogues, from space stations to the fragments of two disasters.
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Close approaches
Your browser screens the objects shown for pairs that pass close to each other. A rough approximation from public orbit data, not a collision warning: these orbits are often off by a kilometre or more, and operators work with better orbits and collision probabilities. Pairs that move together (docked, or fragments still side by side) and pairs of two Starlink satellites are left out.
The objects shown have changed: screen again to include them.
What is up there
Radars and telescopes regularly track about 47,000 objects in Earth orbit. Only about 15,800 of them are working satellites; the rest are dead satellites, spent rocket stages and fragments. Below the size that can be tracked there is much more: models estimate 68,450 objects larger than 10 cm and 1.5 million between 1 and 10 cm (ESA, statistics of 2 November 2026). The globe above shows about a third of the tracked ones.
Three kinds of orbit
Most objects fly in low Earth orbit, below 2,000 km, where one turn takes about an hour and a half: the dense shell close to the surface. Navigation satellites (GPS, Galileo) fly at about 20,000 km, in medium Earth orbit, and need about half a day per orbit. Geostationary satellites, at 35,786 km, take one sidereal day, so they stay above one spot of the equator: the far ring (ESA, types of orbits; GPS.gov). Speed the clock up to 3600× to see the difference.
Debris, and the Kessler syndrome
In 1978 Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais warned that once enough objects are in orbit, collisions make fragments faster than the atmosphere removes them, and the debris keeps growing by itself (Kessler and Cour-Palais, 1978). Two events alone left thousands of tracked fragments; the 2,700 still in orbit in November 2026 are on the globe. China destroyed its weather satellite Fengyun-1C with a missile on 11 January 2007, and on 10 February 2009 the working Iridium 33 and the dead Cosmos 2251 collided, the first accidental collision of two whole satellites (NASA ODPO, 2007; 2009). ESA’s latest report finds that even with no new launches, the debris population would keep growing (ESA Space Environment Report 2026).
How collisions are avoided
Surveillance networks, such as the US Space Surveillance Network, compare the orbits of all catalogued objects and send operators conjunction data messages: who comes close to whom, when, and how uncertain that is. A satellite in low orbit gets hundreds of alerts a week; most are dismissed, and when the probability of a collision is above typically 1 in 10,000, the operator moves the satellite (ESA, 2019; NASA CARA). ESA needs more than one avoidance manoeuvre per satellite per year. The International Space Station had made 41 since 1999 (NASA ODPO, September 2025), and SpaceX reported 207,152 for its Starlink satellites in the six months from December 2025 to May 2026 (Space.com, July 2026).
Sources and credits. Orbits: CelesTrak GP data (from the US Space Force's public catalogue), copied to this site once a day. Propagation: satellite.js 7.1.0 (MIT licence), an implementation of SGP4. Earth: NASA's Blue Marble (Reto Stöckli, NASA Goddard; public domain). The globe is drawn with WebGL, by this page's own code; nothing is loaded from other sites.