>>15005916
'Large enough to track' is anything more than say, 10cm. Not going to reflect or refract nearly enough light to be seen, especially at this scale.
I don't think people understand how far these things are from each other, despite there being so many of them. LEO is ~120 miles to 1,000 miles above surface. Think about if you had all of these ~25,000 >10cm chunks floating ON the surface of the Earth, say the ocean (this ignores the fact that there are TONS of orbital altitudes between 120-1000 miles, this analogy would put them all at 120mi, greatly increasing collision chances) somewhat equidistant from each other spread across the earth. The earth is only ~25k miles in circumference, so… Even IF every trackable object was orbiting at the same orbital altitude AND lined up on the equator (same EXACT orbit), they'd still have more than a mile in between them, being roughly equidistant.
The nearest other chunk is going to be so far away, not to mention another huge sat that is going to perfectly reflect light into the camera sensor. That's like taking a picture of a skyscraper and being unable to see a car a mile off in the distance.
Now, to expand the shitty analogy to more 'real' terms… The area of space orbit is much larger than Earth itself (we used the Earths surface in the analogy), approximately 2,000 miles larger in diameter than the Earth itself. We also have a range of ~900 miles of altitude instead of just one altitude (floating on surface). So, in reality, it's much, much farther than our analogy.
The scale of these images is really not fathomable until you start doing the calculations.