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Yahoo!'s Space > Satellites category offers a full payload of web sites with information about man-made orbiting machines, how they work, what they do, and where in the sky to look for them. The Satellite Encyclopedia offers a sampling of free information or a fee-based subscription service for detailed and up-to-date satellite data. (If you have an interest, you might want to pay for the subscription service in hopes of getting an absolutely precise answer.) We decided to look elsewhere by searching specifically for "number
of manmade satellites." One result, Satellites as a System, noted that there are "an estimated 2200 tons of manmade junk in the environment near the earth." Another result pointed us to The Satellite Situation Report from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Dated September, 1997, the report counts almost 25,000 man-made objects: 8681 currently in orbit, and over 16,000 objects in a state of decay. Not every single satellite is included, since some are too small or too far away from home to be detected. Russia leads the list in decayed objects (with a debris count close to 10,000) and comes in a close second (3897) to the
United States (4018) for currently orbiting objects. Keep in mind that these figures are already a few years old. By editing the web site address at the top of our web browser, we were able to locate NASA's Liftoff to Space Exploration site and an additional Satellites page that confirms the existence of over 8,000 artificial orbiting objects. Want to count the satellites overhead tonight in your corner of the cosmos? Visit J-Pass, a real-time satellite tracker from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
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