- Earth-watching satellite
- NORAD 27386
- 2002-009A
- Low Earth orbit
- Naked-eye
Current orbit
View on live mapOrbit began over the Kara Sea
Orbit ends over the Barents Sea
Sunlit since
Enters the Earth’s shadow
Passes over you
Say where you are and your own next passes appear here, the first drawn across your sky.
Your position is rounded to about a kilometre and sent only to the Orbinauts API, to find the pass.
Meanwhile, the next visible pass over three cities:
- LondonNo visible pass in the next 10 days
- New York CityNo visible pass in the next 10 days
- Sydney
How to see it
It crosses the sky as a steady point of light, no brighter than a faint star, a few minutes from one horizon to the other and never blinking. Its orbit keeps it over the line between day and night, so the hour after sunset and the hour before sunrise are the times to look, under as dark a sky as you can find. It can be seen from anywhere on Earth.
Passes over: Paris, Rome, Mumbai, Seoul, Melbourne, Chicago, Lima, Nairobi, every city
Altitude
One reading a day, worked out from the elements Space-Track publishes.
Timeline
- Launch
Launched on Ariane 5 from Kourou. Source
- End of mission
Its mission ended.
Summary
Over the Barents Sea LIVE
Where is Envisat?
At 5:11:56 AM UTC Envisat was over the Barents Sea (81.5° N, 55.4° E), 774 km up, moving at 7.47 km/s and in sunlight.
What is Envisat?
A satellite that watches the Earth in low Earth orbit, in space since Mar 1, 2002; its mission ended on Apr 8, 2012.
Can I see Envisat tonight?
Yes: Envisat can be seen with the naked eye when it passes over you in a dark sky, after dusk or before dawn, as a steady light that crosses the sky in a few minutes.
General
- Launched
- Ended
- Rocket
- Ariane 5
- Watches
- The land, the atmosphere, the oceans and the ice caps, with ten instruments, an imaging radar among them
- Full picture of the Earth
- Every 1 to 3 days for most of its instruments, until it ended
- Operator
- ESA, which flew it from its operations centre in Darmstadt
- Mass
- about 8.1 t
- Typical altitude
- 761 to 762 km
- Speed
- about 7.47 km/s (26,900 km/h)
Latest orbital data
- Position received
- 5:11 AM UTC
- Station time (UTC)
- 5:11 AM UTC
- Latitude / longitude
- 81.5° N, 55.4° E
- Altitude
- 774 km
- Speed
- 7.47 km/s (26,906 km/h)
- Course
- west
- Light
- In sunlight until 5:18 AM UTC
- Inclination
- 98.4°
- Orbital period
- 100.1 minutes
- Orbits per day
- 14.39
- This orbit
- 758 to 760 km
- In shadow
- 31 minutes of each orbit
- In view from
- Within 2,070 km of the point below it
- Elements epoch
- Nov 3, 2026, 8:31 PM, 8 hours old
- Source
- Position from Space-Track orbital elements of Nov 3, 2026, 8:31 PM, 8 hours old.
No operator publishes an ephemeris for Envisat, so every position here comes from its orbital elements.
In orbit
- Close approaches
- No close approach to Envisat has been reported publicly in the past thirty days.
- Losing to drag
- Envisat is falling less than a metre a day, read from the last 49 days of samples.
From Space-Track’s public conjunction messages; the latest report was issued Nov 3, 2026, 1:53 PM, 15 hours old. Only approaches serious enough to be reported publicly are listed: within three days and, for two bodies near the Earth, closer than a kilometre with a chance of a collision above 1 in 10,000, the level at which NASA moves the ISS.
Data and API
The current elements from Space-Track as an OMM object, epoch Nov 3, 2026, 8:31 PM, 8 hours old.
{
"OBJECT_NAME": "ENVISAT",
"OBJECT_ID": "2002-009A",
"EPOCH": "2026-11-03T20:31:12.113184",
"MEAN_MOTION": 14.39091881,
"ECCENTRICITY": 0.00012898,
"INCLINATION": 98.4024,
"RA_OF_ASC_NODE": 256.1686,
"ARG_OF_PERICENTER": 83.2956,
"MEAN_ANOMALY": 292.7507,
"EPHEMERIS_TYPE": 0,
"CLASSIFICATION_TYPE": "U",
"NORAD_CAT_ID": 27386,
"ELEMENT_SET_NO": 999,
"REV_AT_EPOCH": 29357,
"BSTAR": 0.000031575028,
"MEAN_MOTION_DOT": 5.5e-7,
"MEAN_MOTION_DDOT": 0
}