Fascinating video of the rotation of NASA satellites around the Earth



    You can watch forever not only how the fire burns, water flows, but also how NASA satellites rotate in orbit. The agency recently posted an animation for its 18 satellites, which are in low orbit. These spacecraft constantly transmit information necessary for humanity to Earth: data on the state of the soil, images of various regions, and observations on deserts, forests and cities of our planet. The satellite’s orbit around the Earth is an hour and a half. The video is “compressed” about 12 hours of real time.

    By the way, most satellites follow a certain type of polar orbit called solar-synchronous . This type of orbit allows the satellite to observe the same region at the same time (local time) every day.

    Some of these satellites - Aqua, Aura, CALIPSO, and CloudSat, are even combined into a "satellite train", A-Train. In the video, A-Train appears at 0:07, the satellites follow almost identical orbits. Interestingly, the time interval between CloudSat and CALIPSO is only 12.5 seconds. The “train” turned out to be very useful for scientists, since there are 15 scientific instruments on 4 satellites. And, since the satellites travel through the same regions at about the same time, the data obtained by these tools can be easily compared. Such a work system can be described as one satellite with 15 scientific instruments on board.


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