About 100-200 objects, each larger than a football, re-enter every year, but there are still many pieces of space junk in orbit. A survey carried out in June 2000 calculated that there are 90 space probes and 2,671 satellites still in space. There are as many as 100,000 objects larger than 10cm including parts of rockets: an Ariane rocket booster exploded in 1986, scattering 400 fragments large enough to be tracked. In 1991 space shuttle Discovery STS-48 narrowly avoided a discarded Soviet rocket.
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