Tracking Satellites and Space Debris in Earth Orbit (Feb 2024)

  • Released Monday, June 16, 2025
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This visualization depicts objects in orbit around Earth as of February 2024. It begins with approximately 31,000 orange dots, each representing a trackable object in the publicly available database. Green dots then fade in, highlighting around 9,300 active (currently operational) satellites.

This series of visualizations illustrates the population of objects orbiting Earth as of February 2024. The data comes from United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), via space-track.org, which maintains a publicly available catalog of trackable objects in space. These include active satellites, defunct spacecraft, rocket bodies, and debris fragments larger than roughly 10 cm in low Earth orbit. While smaller debris also exists, it typically goes untracked due to observational limits, making the actual number of objects in orbit significantly higher than what is shown here.

The NASA Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) Program located at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) provides conjunction analysis and risk assessment services for all NASA spacecraft not affiliated with human space flight. CARA is responsible for protecting the orbital environment from collision between NASA non-human space flight missions and other tracked and cataloged on-orbit objects.

This visualization depicts objects in orbit around Earth as of February 2024, with approximately 31,000 orange dots representing all trackable objects in the publicly available database.

This visualization depicts objects in orbit around Earth as of February 2024. It begins with a view of approximately 31,000 orange dots, representing all trackable objects in the publicly available database. Green dots then fade in, depicting around 9,300 active (currently operational) satellites. Finally, a set of blue satellites fades in, representing the ~56 satellites supported by NASA’s Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team.

This visualization depicts objects in orbit around Earth as of February 2024, with approximately 31,000 orange dots representing all trackable objects in the publicly available database. This version is zoomed in slightly.

This visualization is the same as the others above, with the sets of satellites (CARA-supported, Active Satellites, and All Tracked Earth-Orbiting Objects) introduced in reverse order.

An animated graph illustrating the growing number of tracked objects in Earth orbit over time.

Active Starlink satellites as of February 2024 (approximately 5,410 satellites).

A view of leftover debris from the 2009 collision between Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33, still in orbit as of February 2024 (~500 trackable objects).

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

Citing this page

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17162527

This page was originally published on Monday, June 16, 2025.
This page was last updated on Thursday, July 3, 2025 at 11:04 AM EDT.