Why Are Satellites Important?

. Satellites are programmed to avoid meteorites so they don’t get destroyed. Of over 8,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, only one has ever been destroyed by a meteorite.

By examining high-resolution satellite imagery with algorithms developed via trial-and-error, Sarah Parcak, and her team have discovered 17 pyramids, 1,000 tombs, and over 3,100 settlements in Egypt alone

In 2007, China tested a missile and shot down one of their own satellites, accidentally creating 2,087 pieces of space debris on crazy orbits, all of which are now required to be tracked to avoid space collisions.

The first American spy satellites literally dropped their film from space in a “film bucket” that was then scooped up in midair by a plane

The first attempt of the United States to launch a satellite into orbit failed, the Soviet Union offered the United States aid which was earmarked for undeveloped countries.

There is a satellite orbiting Earth that is predicted to re-enter the atmosphere in 8.4 million years, carrying a message addressed to the beings/humans and civilization of the future

In 1977, William Kampiles stole a top secret KH-11 spy satellite manual from the CIA which he sold to the Russians for $3000. He then told the CIA for who he worked what he had done in the hopes that they would hire him as a double agent. They didn’t and he was sentenced to 40 years in

Older generation spy satellites predated any form of digital imaging by decades. They literally exposed film and dropped it back to earth in small re-entry pods.

When the Skylab satellite crashed in Australia in 1979, Australia issued the US a fine for littering. NASA didn’t pay the fine

A city in Texas renamed itself to “DISH, Texas” in order to receive free Dish Satellite service for 10 years.

A man received an emergency satellite locator beacon as a present, didn’t read the instructions and ended up triggering 9 false alarms Search and Rescue deployments over the course of 12 weeks

In 1996, NASA generated electricity with a satellite on a 13-mile long wire, released from Space Shuttle. The wire was clearly visible from Earth and was one of the biggest human-made objects in space.

Former USSR Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear holocaust and potentially WWIII by going with his “gut feeling” and believing that the USSR’s early-warning satellite signal was faulty when it reported that the US had launched 5 ballistic missiles at them.

In 1981, India launched its first satellite that was transported on an ox-cart, with the rocket parts carried on the back of bicycles

Regardless of what service you get weather information from, almost all of the data comes from the same place. NOAA has the only nationwide weather radar and operates the only weather satellites in the US.  It freely distributes its information into the public domain.

In 1998, one satellite failed and it caused about 80% of the world’s pagers to stop working.

Most of the money George Clooney makes off his Nespresso commercials; he spends on a satellite that surveils over the border of North and South Sudan to keep an eye on criminal and dictator Omar al-Bashir to track his vicious army in an attempt to warn civilians before attacks occur.

TLC was founded in 1972 with the help of NASA and was an informative and instructional network focused on providing real education via television; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite.

Satellites travel at 18,000 miles per hour. That means in a given day, satellites can travel the entire circumference of the Earth about 14 times.

If you put all of the data that our satellites collect in a year on DVDs, it would form a stack nearly 4 times the height of the Empire State Building.

There are over 2,500 satellites in orbit around the Earth.

DigitalGlobe has four satellites around the world at any given moment, ready to take instant pictures of world events.

In addition to being used for defense and intelligence, satellite imagery has many innovative uses in the environmental, economic, entertainment and humanitarian sectors.

The satellites are launched into the space to do a specific job, There are satellites that are launched to monitor the cloud patterns for the weather station, There are satellites that launched to send television signals for Sky TV, and every satellite has to be designed specifically to fulfill its function.

The satellites are used for many things such as the communication, the oceanography, the astronomy, the surveillance, They help many scientists get a perceptive view at all kinds of objects anywhere in the world.