Everything working in orbit today, the ring that stands still, and the junk.
Open the trip: Satellites and space junk
This is the International Space Station, about four hundred kilometres up. It moves at eight kilometres every second and circles the Earth sixteen times a day. Hold on to that height and that speed. Nearly everything else on this trip shares them.
Every dot is a working satellite, at the place it is right now. The line below counts them from the catalogue this page loaded today, and counts how many of them belong to a single internet network, Starlink.
Nearly all of them fly low, under two thousand kilometres. Down here a satellite circles the Earth in about ninety minutes, and junk can cross its path at almost seven times the speed of a bullet. That is why even small pieces matter.
Much higher, nearly thirty-six thousand kilometres up, a satellite takes one day to go round, so from the ground it hangs over one spot. That is why a television dish never has to move. Weather satellites sit here too, each watching one side of the Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been up here since 1990, about five hundred kilometres above the ground. Like the weather satellites, and the station with its crew, it depends on the space around it staying clear.
This is Envisat, once the world's largest civilian Earth-watching satellite. Contact was lost in 2012 and it has circled since, eight tonnes with nobody at the controls. It is expected to stay up for about a hundred and fifty years.
The last stage of a rocket often stays in orbit after its job is done. About two thousand of them are up here now. In all, some forty-seven thousand objects are tracked, and by Europe's estimate more than a million pieces are too small to track.
Thin air drags on everything in low orbit, and in the end it falls and burns. The largest spacecraft are steered down here, to the part of the Pacific farthest from any land. The Mir space station ended here. The International Space Station is due to follow.
Everything is drawn where it really is, from CelesTrak orbital elements and the planets’ own orbits (astronomy-engine).