November 12, 2022 · about 862 km up · 3 years ago · counted by launch designator
623 fragments still on orbit
A Long March 6A upper stage broke apart a few hours after it had successfully delivered the Yunhai-3 weather satellite. NASA’s debris office ranks it among the worst debris-generating events in the history of spaceflight.
The event took place on November 12, 2022 at roughly 862 km. A Long March 6A upper stage broke apart a few hours after it had successfully delivered the Yunhai-3 weather satellite. NASA’s debris office ranks it among the worst debris-generating events in the history of spaceflight. What the catalogue has recorded since is 800 trackable fragments — pieces large enough for ground radar to find and follow, which in practice means roughly 10 cm and up. Everything smaller is up there too and is not counted by anyone, here or elsewhere; a fleck of paint at orbital speed carries about the energy of a rifle round, and no public catalogue can see it.
3 years later, 77.9% of it is still in orbit. The fragments now sit between 360 and 1,212 km, with the middle of the cloud at 804 km — spread by the breakup into a band far wider than the original orbit, and thinning only slowly.
Air drag is what cleans orbit, and there is almost none of it above about 600 km. Compare this cloud with Delta (1977), the furthest away in altitude of the 16 plotted here — a gap of 764 km. CZ-6A (2022) sits at 804 km and is 22.1% gone; Delta (1977) sits at 1,568 km and is 6.5% gone — and it happened in 1977, earlier. Lower is why this one is going away, and it is not close.
That is the whole argument of this layer, and it is the reason an anti-satellite test at 800 km is a fundamentally different act from the same test at 400 km. One is cleaned up by the atmosphere within a decade or two. The other is a hazard your grandchildren will be flying through.
This one cloud is 5% of every piece of debris currently tracked around Earth — 623 of 12,520. It ranks #3 of the 16 named clouds plotted on this layer. The named clouds are not the whole catalogue, and the hub says so plainly: most tracked debris traces back to launches with no famous name attached, including two rocket upper stages that each left behind more than this page’s smallest cloud.
Counts and altitudes for this cloud were derived from the CelesTrak SATCAT — the public satellite catalogue — read July 26, 2026. Live positions on the globe come from CelesTrak GP element sets, propagated in your browser. “On orbit” means no decay date on file; “burned up” means a decay date has been recorded. Fragments reenter continually, so these figures are a snapshot of one day rather than a running total. This cloud’s fragments are counted by launch designator — every catalogued fragment sharing this launch’s ID, which is how the catalogue groups breakups that have no curated group of their own. Other figures on this layer are counted by a different method, and the two do not produce identical totals — a launch can carry several satellites, so a fragment’s attributed parent is not always its launch. Neither is wrong; they answer slightly different questions. The catalogue-wide total was read live on July 27, 2026.