Earth & Orbit

Satellites, debris, weather craft and everything else that goes round the planet, and what each one is for.

2 stories

The Earth surrounded by a dense cloud of thousands of points, each a tracked satellite or piece of debris, showing how many satellites are in orbit

How many satellites are in orbit? The junkyard above us

About seventeen thousand working machines, and at least as many dead ones, share the space a few hundred kilometres over your head. How it filled up in one lifetime, who keeps the list, what a collision looks like, and why it reaches your weather forecast.

9 Oct 202612 min read

The Earth in daylight with named satellites marked around it, among them Landsat, Sentinel and weather satellites, a picture of what satellites do

Earth & Orbit

What do satellites do? The machines you used before breakfast

The time on your phone, the dot on the map, the weather icon, the bread on the table: an ordinary morning leans on a few hundred quiet machines that almost nobody thinks about. Where they are, how they work, and how easily they could be taken away.

7 Oct 202611 min read