January 11, 2007 · about 865 km up · 19 years ago · counted by CelesTrak named debris group
2,325 fragments still on orbit
China destroyed its own defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite with a ground-launched missile, creating the largest debris cloud in the history of spaceflight.
The event took place on January 11, 2007 at roughly 865 km. China destroyed its own defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite with a ground-launched missile, creating the largest debris cloud in the history of spaceflight. What the catalogue has recorded since is 3,537 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.
19 years later, 65.7% of it is still in orbit. The fragments now sit between 360 and 1,952 km, with the middle of the cloud at 832 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 Cosmos 1408, the furthest away in altitude of the four plotted here — a gap of 444 km. Fengyun-1C sits at 832 km and is 34.3% gone; Cosmos 1408 sits at 388 km and is 99.7% gone — and it happened in 2021, later. Higher is why this one is staying, and age has very little to do with it.
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 18.6% of every piece of debris currently tracked around Earth — 2,325 of 12,522. It ranks #1 of the 4 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 from CelesTrak’s own curated debris group for this event — the fragments CelesTrak attributes to it by name, which is the same list this map propagates. 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 26, 2026.