Low Earth orbit is more crowded than ever, with tens of thousands of objects circling the planet at breakneck speeds. To make sense of this dense cosmic traffic, space-tracking company LeoLabs has built a free live interactive map that visualizes everything orbiting Earth, providing a real-time window into what satellites must dodge daily.
A Crowded Sky
In total, LeoLabs tracks nearly 29,000 objects in low Earth orbit. The map uses an intuitive color-coding system to classify what is actively flying overhead:
- Green (Active Satellites): These represent working satellites providing crucial everyday connectivity, such as internet and phone services. Currently, almost 17,000 active satellites orbit the planet with 11,000 belonging to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation alone.
- Yellow (Rocket Parts): Spent booster stages and components discarded and left in orbit following space launches.
- Red (Debris): Fragments from satellite collisions and disintegrated spacecraft that continue to circle Earth as dangerous space junk.
- Blue (Unknown Objects): Unidentified items picked up by tracking radar where the exact identity or origin has not yet been determined.
Users exploring the map can zoom in on any individual dot to view specific details about the object and trace its exact flight path across the globe in real time.
Tracking and Collision Avoidance
To keep this live picture accurate and assist satellites in avoiding catastrophic collisions, LeoLabs relies on its own global network of ground-based radars.
The company is also making its monitoring capabilities more deployable. LeoLabs recently won a contract to produce a modular radar system compact enough to fit inside a standard shipping container, enabling ground-based orbital tracking hardware to be deployed virtually anywhere in the world.
The interactive tracking map is completely free and accessible to the public, offering a vivid look at human infrastructure and debris in near-Earth space.
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