How many and what are the “known” satellites currently in orbiting the earth?”
Yahoo!’s Space > Satellites category (http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Space/Satellites/) 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 (http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/online/) 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.” (http://search.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=number+of+manmade+satellites) One result, Satellites as a System (http://www.pacr-cap.org/PACR_AE/Chap%203%20satellites.htm), 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 (http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/aca
