Dr Stuart Grey

Royal Institution Advent Calendar: A History of Space Debris

Dec 07, 2015

I created a inteactive space debris visualisation for the Royal Institution Christmas lectures 2015 using space-track.org data and WebGL. Enjoy!

Almost 20,000 pieces of space debris are currently orbiting the Earth. This visualisation, created by Dr Stuart Grey, lecturer at University College London and part of the Space Geodesy and Navigation Laboratory, tells the story of where it all came from, using data on the precise location of each piece of junk.

Scroll through the decades and see the mark we’re leaving on the area around our planet with our forays beyond our atmosphere.