500,000 pieces of debris that are currently tracked by NASA and there’are more than million small debris that can’t be tracked due to their small size.

They travel at a speed of 17500 mph = 28163.52 kmph with this velocity a small piece of debris can cause a significant damage to spacecrafts and satellites.

 

Orbital debris include both man-made space junk and space meteoroid or micrometeorite

Man-made orbital debris include nonfunctional satellites, collision related fragments and launching vehicles stages.

Fortunately, spacecrafts and satellites can avoid any collision with tracked orbital debris. However, untracked small orbital debris and micrometeorite pose a huge problem.     

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In 1996, a French satellite was hit and damaged by debris from a French rocket that had exploded a decade earlier.

On Feb. 10, 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. Iridium commercial satellite. The collision added more than 2,000 pieces of traceable debris to the inventory of space junk.

China's 2007 anti-satellite test, which used a missile to destroy an old weather satellite, added more than 3,000 pieces to the debris problem.

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