[NickC25]

That's really cool. I know this comment is low-effort, but I don't really care - this type of real-time visualization is really interesting and I want to see more of this sort of thing going forward.

That said, the blue dots are "unknown" - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?

[tullianus]

Often you can figure out what spacecraft/rocket a piece of debris came from with a good catalogue of orbits and some math - these are labeled "Debris." Often you just can't - these are labeled "Unknown."

The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and they occasionally will pretend one of their classified satellites doesn't exist, but there's only a handful of these.

[3pt14159]

> but there's only a handful of these.

Huge if true.

[tullianus]

Oh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space Force catalog.

[aerostable_slug]

I'd add that it would be pointless to try to hide a fair number of them, given that they approach the size of school buses (no joke — the now-retired KH-9 was nicknamed "Big Bird" for good reason) and can be imaged on relatively consumer-ready optics. Some Russians made a nice stink a few years ago by using (IIRC) laser illumination to make some relatively high-res shots of American recce sats.

The interesting aspects of them have to do with how far off-axis they can function. This was the major consequence of loss of the Morison leak of the KH-11 shots of a Soviet carrier to Jane's Defense Weekly — the image revealed how far off-axis it could image and some clues to how it processed imagery.

[bagels]

Often not in the public catalog though.

[maicro]

I only saw one blue dot while looking around (briefly on a laggy computer, so there are probably plenty of others): "L6188942", which you can isolate in the view by searching for it. https://www.n2yo.com/database/?id=81078#results shows there are no results for the "NORAD ID" for that same object.

I don't have any domain knowledge here, so can't argue either way, but one possibility I can imagine is it's a place holder for "somebody launched something and we just don't have the records yet". No clue how realistic that is, and I'd trust my sibling comment's explanation more, but it wouldn't shock me if it takes time for info to propagate.