According to DoD there are 7,000 unknown objects in our orbit

reply to post by roughycannon


The fine print next to the * says unknown object/ unknown origin, I had to look close to see it.

Hinsch beat me to it

DoD should worry about defense.

Leave space to NASA.

Interesting find, notice the sudden jump between 2002/2004. Probably due to advancements in the way they look for these objects.

But its a significant jump all the same.

Yes I know the small print says that, but you are reading between the lines, in hierarchy it is uncatalogued first the second bit of unknown origin etc. is just that, NASA tracks everything in our earth's orbit and sometimes it can be too small to see and in most cases they cant actually sample it and tell where its from... so it goes into the "uncatalogued" category.

*uncatalogued=unknown object and/or unknown origin

reply to post by hinsch


I'm more interested in the drop off in 1987 + 1997 in the "uncataloged" area. Then they go back up. Did something leave the orbit and come back?

reply to post by DisturbedToo


It may have been things they considered to be in orbit... passing meteors or mistakes in the system that were rectified the next time around the "sudden" dips in the graph suggest that to me

You may want to modify the original post to smth like: " ...and those uncataloged (unknown objects and/or unknown origins)" ,to avoid ppl replying "it says uncataloged", as they might not notice the * print in there.

Anyway, good find I guess. I already see that some people are thinking that NASA may not have time, resources or interest to catalogue some uninteresting or some way evident objects. However if that is the case, can someone elaborate what kind of objects are we talking about here ?

Originally posted by inthemistandfog
You may want to modify the original post to smth like

Done, thanks.

Seriously, there could be thousands of bolts and screws, and countless pieces of satellites up there. Just because they cant tell us what they are dosnt mean its unique.

When I first saw topic it got me thinking "black knight" !! That would some find...

Looks like the Kessler syndrome is beginning to gain momentum. Excellent work there China & Russia, looks like you guys are the ones responsible for the 2 biggest orbital collisions resulting in the first "dominoes" to begin the cascade of events.

Originally posted by harrytuttle
Looks like the Kessler syndrome is beginning to gain momentum. Excellent work there China & Russia, looks like you guys are the ones responsible for the 2 biggest orbital collisions resulting in the first "dominoes" to begin the cascade of events.

Wow never heard of that before interesting theory it really could create a "domino" effect when you think about it...

Originally posted by hinsch
Reading the "National Security Space Strategy Unclassified Summary" i found some interesting statistics about objects orbiting our planet:

Uncataloged means that they didn't identify those objects YET. You can see on the chart a big jump of the Uncataloged objects and then a jump od the Debris few years later because they identified those objects. There's a big correlation in this two groups. These are human made objects and they're tracking those for the safety of all the sattelites in the orbit.