All About Satellites

All satellites are launched into space by some sort of spacecraft or rocket. How else would you get a giant piece of metal into orbit? Certainly you couldn’t have a plane perform that task. Rocket propulsion is the key ingredient to getting our TV signals out into the universe.

Satellites are used for many different occasions and reasons. Some are used for military reconnaissance, to watch other countries movements. Some are used as help in navigation, such as global positioning. Other satellites monitor the sky and the world around us and are even used for scientific experiments.

Satellites can also be used and flown if you will, in many different ways. For example, our television satellites which are in use at this very moment, such as Echostar X and the like, are all geostationary satellites. What this means is that those satellites stay in a fixed position in the sky over a certain portion of Earth. They move as fast as Earth rotates, thereby never appearing as if they are moving.

Other satellites though, like certain space probes are flown out into space and travel in one direction pretty much. They have a trajectory path. You see, in space, when you get moving in one direction, you will continue to move in one direction forever because there is nothing to stop your momentum. This is of course if you do not hit anything else in the way.

How are satellites powered though? When you think about it, you cannot just have a dead piece of metal up there working all the time. Everything needs some sort of power to operate. Satellites, or at least most of them for that matter, use the sun’s energy and radiation for power. The sun is a life giving star to everything in our solar system, including our satellites.

Those giant black panels you see on satellites are the solar panel of cells. Those cells sort of “trap” the sun’s radiation and store it to use it as energy. An amazing concept, don’t you think?

There are other interesting aspects to note of satellites. In order to properly run and remain relatively error free, a lot of thought has to be put into creating one of these objects. Satellites can be equipped with devices that will record the temperature around them, the “weather” if you will in space, and even tiny little jets to help them move along their designated path in space.

As mentioned earlier, not all satellites travel at the same height in space. With hundreds of satellites in orbit around Earth, you have to be very careful otherwise you would have hundreds of collisions up there. Which satellites are some of the lowest?

Well, global positioning satellites are really low, and because they are so low they are not fixed in the sky. Rather, there is a whole series of them up there in space, in order to cover the whole area of Earth. So when you hook up to a GPS system at any given time, it could be a different satellite you are connecting too.