---
title: "Satellites in orbit around the Earth"
url: "https://spacecatalog.org/satellites"
release: null
licence: null
citation: null
---

# Satellites

16,893 active satellites are in orbit around the Earth as this page loads, and every one of them is drawn above at the place its own published orbital elements put it. The globe is lit for this minute — the line between day and night is where it actually falls — and it opens on the ground beneath you.

The element sets are a median of 43 hours old.

## What is up there

- Space stations · 18
- Starlink · 11,201
- Other broadband · 1,565
- Navigation · 172
- Communications · 751
- Earth observation · 542
- Science · 90
- Amateur and CubeSat · 459
- Unclassified · 2,249

## Where these positions come from

Each satellite is published as a set of orbital elements fitted to radar and optical tracking, together with the instant those elements describe. They are not positions: they are the input to a specific model of how an orbit decays under drag and the Earth’s equatorial bulge, and only that model returns the satellite to where it was seen. Your browser runs it, once for every satellite, several times a second.

The accuracy that model is capable of is about a kilometre at the moment an element set was fitted, degrading by a kilometre or so a day after it. The catalogue here is refreshed daily. That is close enough to say which satellite is passing over a country and not close enough to point a telescope, and nothing on this page should be used to predict a close approach.

Only satellites in orbit around the Earth are shown. Spacecraft on their way to the Moon or beyond it are tracked in a different way entirely and are not in this picture.

Elements and catalogue data from [CelesTrak](https://celestrak.org/). Source: USSPACECOM / 18th Space Defense Squadron via Space-Track.org, distributed by CelesTrak. They are redistributed under USSPACECOM’s approval for element sets and the satellite catalogue, which asks for that citation. The Earth is drawn from NASA imagery; the same maps are used on [the Earth’s own page](https://spacecatalog.org/object/earth).

The page itself, with the globe: https://spacecatalog.org/satellites