Low Earth orbit
Orbit around Earth between 160 and 2000 km / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25.[1] Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, peaking in number at an altitude around 800 km (500 mi),[2] while the farthest in LEO, before medium Earth orbit (MEO), have an altitude more than about one-third of the radius of Earth (or about 2000 kilometers),[3] roughly at the beginning of the inner Van Allen radiation belt.
The term LEO region is also used for the area of space below an altitude of 2,000 km (1,200 mi) (about one-third of Earth's radius).[4] Objects in orbits that pass through this zone, even if they have an apogee further out or are sub-orbital, are carefully tracked since they present a collision risk to the many LEO satellites.
No human spaceflights other than the lunar missions of the Apollo program have taken place beyond LEO. All space stations to date have operated geocentric within LEO.