Fascinating video rotation of NASA satellites around the Earth

You can always watch not only how the fire burns, water flows, but also how NASA satellites rotate in orbit. Recently, the agency has posted an animation for its 18 satellites that are in low orbit. These spacecraft constantly transmit the necessary information to humanity on Earth: data on the state of the soil, pictures of various regions, observations of deserts, forests and cities of our planet. The orbital period of the satellite around the earth is an hour and a half. In the video "compressed" about 12 hours of real time.

By the way, most satellites follow a particular type of polar orbit , which is called sun-synchronous . This type of orbit allows a 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”, the A-Train. The A-Train appears on video at 0:07, satellites follow almost identical orbits. Interestingly, the time interval between CloudSat and CALIPSO is only 12.5 seconds. The “train” was very useful for scientists, since there are 15 scientific instruments on 4 satellites. And since the satellites pass through the same regions at about the same time, the data obtained by these tools can be easily compared. Such a system of work can be described as one satellite with 15 scientific instruments on board.
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