Debris Cloud Maps

In this page I attempt to show the location of major debris clouds in (height, inclination) space. The rectangular boundaries of the clouds in these maps show the height and inc ranges within which 95 percent of the cataloged objects in the clouds are found. Only clouds which still have cataloged objects in orbit in 2022 are shown.

In this overview map, all the debris clouds in my catalog are shown. Note, however, that many clouds have very few cataloged objects. This is especially true for high altitude clouds where the cloud may consistent of hundreds of significant-size debris objects only one or two of which are cataloged due to the limitations of current US Space Force sensors.

The main thing to notice here is how any given cloud generally covers only a fairly limited range of inclination. This is less true for high altitude clouds, since the lower velocities in high apogee orbits mean that a bigger inclination change happens for the same amount of delta-V.

In this map of low Earth orbit, we include clouds between 0 and 3000 km, and exclude clouds which extend to altitudes above 4000 km. Here it can be seen that the inclination ranges are usually very narrow for LEO debris clouds. This helps greatly with identifiying candidate parent clouds for a given debris object

This map shows only the largest debris clouds, those with more than 500 cataloged objects.

FY1C is the 2007 Chinese antisatellite test.
AR16 is Ariane V16, the upper stage from the 1986 Spot 1/Viking launch.
Ir33 and K2251 are the clouds resulting from the 2009 collision of Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251.
HAPS2 is the cloud from the disintegration of a Pegasus HAPS upper stage launched in 1994.
Finally, K1408 is the cloud from the Nov 2021 Russian antisatellite test.

This map shows intermediate size debris clouds in LEO, with at least 50 cataloged objects. The following maps zoom in to limited inclination ranges to show things more cleary.

LEO Debris clouds with i between 60 and 80 degrees.

LEO Debris clouds with i between 80 and 97 degrees. Note the very localized cloud from the SNAPSHOT satellite ("SNAP")

LEO Debris clouds with i between 97 and 102 degrees, the main part of sun-synchrounous orbit, dominated by the FY-1C cloud but with many other debris clouds overlapping it. Note also the well-localized cloud from Nimbus 2 (NIM2) at 1100 km, 100.4 deg.

Large (more than 200 cataloged objects) LEO clouds in sun-synchronous orbit.

LEO Debris clouds with i between 99 and 105 degrees. Note the Delta 98/104/126 cloud, resulting from three Delta upper stage explosions, dominating the debris population above 101 deg.