Satellites in sentence

232 examples of Satellites in a sentence

GPS satellites rely on cesium and rubidium atoms as frequency standards.

So that's all it takes: a multibillion-dollar network of satellites, oscillating cesium atoms, quantum mechanics, relativity, a smartphone, and you.

Now, we're leaping over all of that, over the giant antennas and the relay satellites and the vastness between worlds to take our first steps on this landscape as if we were truly there.

And the nervous system of communications is the Internet cables, satellites, cellular networks and data centers that allow us to share information.

This is the map produced by taking satellite images, if you remember those satellites around the planet in the very first slide I showed, and producing an image of what the Earth looks like at night.

Now the lights on the map, the lights in London, the lights in Cairo, the lights in Tokyo, the lights on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, the lights show you where people live who are so profligate with energy that they can afford to spend money powering lights to shine up into the sky, so satellites can draw an image like this.

What about satellites, you might ask?

Well, satellites are fantastic, and they have taught us so much about the big picture over the past few decades.

However, the problem with satellites is they can only see through one micron of the surface of the ocean.

Think of them as surface satellites.

These many things that enable our daily lives rely either directly or indirectly on satellites.

And while we often take for granted the services that satellites provide us, the satellites themselves deserve our attention as they are leaving a lasting mark on the space they occupy.

Satellites even play a role in the operation of our financial and energy markets.

But these satellites that we rely on day in and day out have a finite life.

At this point, these satellites effectively become space junk, cluttering the orbital environment.

Satellites that are no longer working are often left to deorbit over many, many years, or only moved out of the way as a temporary solution.

Decades later and dozens of countries from all around the world have launched thousands of more satellites into orbit, and the frequency of launches is only going to increase in the future, especially if you consider things like the possibility of 900-plus satellite constellations being launched.

Now, we send satellites to different orbits depending on what they're needed for.

One of the most common places we send satellites is the low Earth orbit, possibly to image the surface of Earth at up to about 2,000 kilometers altitude.

Satellites there are naturally buffeted by Earth's atmosphere, so their orbits naturally decay, and they'll eventually burn up, probably within a couple of decades.

Another common place we send satellites is the geostationary orbit at about 35,000 kilometers altitude.

Satellites there remain in the same place above Earth as the Earth rotates, which enables things like communications or television broadcast, for example.

Satellites in high orbits like these could remain there for centuries.

And then there's the orbit coined "the graveyard," the ominous junk or disposal orbits, where some satellites are intentionally placed at the end of their life so that they're out of the way of common operational orbits.

Of the nearly 7,000 satellites launched since the late 1950s, only about one in seven is currently operational, and in addition to the satellites that are no longer working, there's also hundreds of thousands of marble-sized debris and millions of paint chip-sized debris that are also orbiting around the Earth.

Space debris is a major risk to space missions, but also to the satellites that we rely on each and every day.

But what if we were smarter about how we designed satellites?

What if all satellites, regardless of what country they were built in, had to be standardized in some way for recycling, servicing or active deorbiting?

What if there actually were international laws with teeth that enforced end-of-life disposal of satellites instead of moving them out of the way as a temporary solution?

This works for the satellite because it's small, but satellites that are higher or in larger orbits or are larger altogether, like the size of school buses, will require other disposal options.

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