KESSLER

From a MATLAB app to a live map

This site started as Space Debris and Objects in LEO, a MATLAB App Designer project that won 1st place. It charted debris, rocket bodies and payloads from China, Russia and the US between 1997 and 2022, with a globe of randomly placed dots. This version covers every tracked object and owner from 1957 to today, places each object at its real position, and refreshes several times a day.

It is named after Donald Kessler, the NASA scientist who in 1978 warned that once low Earth orbit gets crowded enough, collisions could create debris faster than it falls back to Earth. That runaway is now called the Kessler syndrome.

Original team

Brian Alino, Meena Al Hasani, Gregory Maddox, Vedant Patel, Jessica Semaan, Kuday Yurter

Original MATLAB code: github.com/kudayyurter/kessler/tree/main/matlab

How the numbers are counted

  • The catalog lists every object tracked since Sputnik in 1957, including about 35,000 that have already re-entered.
  • An object counts as “in orbit” in a year if it was first seen by then and had not re-entered by the end of that year.
  • Debris is dated by when it appeared, not by its parent's launch. Fragments from known breakups (Fengyun-1C in 2007, Iridium–Cosmos in 2009, Kosmos 1408 in 2021, and others) are dated to the event.
  • Low Earth orbit here means an apogee below 2,000 km.
  • Positions are computed in your browser from published orbital elements with the SGP4 model; the day/night line follows the real Sun.
  • Only objects about 10 cm and larger are tracked. Estimates put the number of 1–10 cm pieces near a million.

Sources