Space debris in near-Earth orbit

A fragment. Some of it comes from collisions and deliberate destruction, some is shed during a launch. Only what is large enough to track is catalogued at all - roughly 10 cm in low orbit - and the smaller pieces, which are far more numerous and still fast enough to destroy a satellite, appear on no map.

Everything up there that was never a spacecraft: fragments of collisions and break-ups, spent upper stages, and the covers and adapters that separate during a launch. Not a purpose - nobody launched these to do anything - and not all there is, either, because only a fraction of the tracked fragments are published without an account. An empty patch of sky on this map means nothing was published for it, not that nothing is there.

The four clouds this map can show

• Debris: Fengyun-1C

  fragments of the Chinese weather satellite Fengyun-1C, destroyed in an anti-satellite test in January 2007 - the largest debris cloud in the catalogue, at around 800 km, where the air is too thin to clear it quickly

• Debris: Cosmos 2251

  fragments of the derelict Russian satellite Cosmos 2251, which collided with Iridium 33 in February 2009 - the first accidental collision of two intact satellites

• Debris: Iridium 33

  fragments of the working communications satellite Iridium 33, the other side of the 2009 collision; there are fewer of them than of Cosmos 2251 because it was the lighter of the two

• Debris: Cosmos 1408

  fragments of the defunct Soviet satellite Cosmos 1408, destroyed in a Russian anti-satellite test in November 2021; the cloud was low enough that most of it has already come down