cross pond high tech

There are more than 1,200 active satellites orbiting earth right now, taking pictures, relaying communications, broadcasting locations, spying on you, and even housing humans. Thanks to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, we can show you each one, as of August 21, 2014.

The satellites are sized according to their launch mass and are colored by their country.

Called the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) and constructed by a joint team of NASA and MIT engineers, the set-up consists of four laser transmitters at a ground terminal in New Mexico, which send coded infrared light pulses though four different telescopes and up to a lunar satellite384,633 kilometers out into the depths of space. As a result, we now have a data uplink with the Moon that reaches up to 19.44 Mbps. If you live in the United States, that’s about two and a half times more powerful than your standard 7.4 Mbps.