Satellites are able to orbit around the planet because they are locked into speeds that are fast enough to defeat the downward pull of gravity. Satellites are sent into space by a rocket launched from the ground with enough energy (at least 25,039 mph!) to get outside our atmosphere.
Satellites can sustain operations in their orbit for a long time. NOAA’s GOES-3 Satellite for example had an operational life spanning five different decades and six different U.S. presidents.
The GOES-3 satellite made history on June 16, 1978, when it became NOAA’s third Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) placed in orbit. In 2016, after 38 years and a second life as a communications satellite, GOES-3, one of the oldest continuously operating satellites in orbit, made history again when it reached the end of its life and completed the decommissioning process on June 29 when the satellite was carefully placed into a “graveyard” orbit.
This orbit requires little velocity to maintain its position because at this distance there is very little gravitational pull from the Earth. The closer satellites are to Earth the more likely it is that they will run into traces of Earth’s atmosphere which create drag. The drag decays the satellite’s orbit and causes it to fall back towards Earth.
What is an orbit?
An orbit is the curved path that an object in space (such as a star, planet, moon, asteroid or spacecraft) takes around another object due to gravity.
Gravity causes objects in space that have mass to be attracted to other nearby objects. If this attraction brings them together with enough momentum, they can sometimes begin to orbit each other.
Objects of similar mass orbit each other with neither object at the centre, whilst small objects orbit around larger objects. In our Solar System, the Moon orbits Earth, and Earth orbits the Sun, but that does not mean the larger object remains completely still. Because of gravity, Earth is pulled slightly from its centre by the Moon (which is why tides form in our oceans) and our Sun is pulled slightly from its centre by Earth and other planets.
During the early creation of our Solar System, dust, gas, and ice travelled through space with speed and momentum, surrounding the Sun in a cloud. With the Sun being so much larger than these small bits of dust and gas, its gravity attracted these bits into orbit around it, shaping the cloud into a kind of ring around the Sun.
Eventually, these particles started to settle and clump together (or ‘coalesce’), growing ever larger like rolling snowballs until they formed what we now see as planets, moons, and asteroids. The fact that the planets were all formed together this way is why all the planets have orbits around the Sun in the same direction, in roughly the same plane.
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