Practical Uses
See also: Geosynchronous satelliteMost commercial communications satellites, broadcast satellites and SBAS satellites operate in geostationary orbits. A geostationary transfer orbit is used to move a satellite from low Earth orbit (LEO) into a geostationary orbit. (Russian television satellites have used elliptical Molniya and Tundra orbits due to the high latitudes of the receiving audience.) The first satellite placed into a geostationary orbit was the Syncom-3, launched by a Delta-D rocket in 1964.
A worldwide network of operational geostationary meteorological satellites is used to provide visible and infrared images of Earth's surface and atmosphere. These satellite systems include:
- the United States GOES
- Meteosat, launched by the European Space Agency and operated by the European Weather Satellite Organization, EUMETSAT
- the Japanese MTSAT
- India's INSAT series
A statite, a hypothetical satellite that uses a solar sail to modify its orbit, could theoretically hold itself in a geostationary "orbit" with different altitude and/or inclination from the "traditional" equatorial geostationary orbit.
Read more about this topic: Geostationary Orbit
Famous quotes containing the word practical:
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)