But one of the big innovations of recent years has been the low-orbiting satellite.
In essence, it would be a giant cable reaching tens of thousands of kilometres into space to an orbiting satellite.
It is made by combining a sequence of radar images acquired by an orbiting satellite "before" and "after" a quake.
Wall says the event, as well as the Soviets launching the first Earth-orbiting satellite four years before, could have been just what the U.S needed.
Other facilities include a small children's library, exhibition spaces, lecture halls, a school for information sciences and a planetarium, this last being a separate, spherical structure poised at one end of the vast outside plaza like an orbiting satellite.
Microwaves are broadcast from, say, New York, to a satellite orbiting over Omaha, then bounced to Los Angeles.
The key property of a satellite orbiting precisely 35, 786 km (22, 240 miles) above the equator is its speed, which mimics the rotation of the Earth below.
Since being demoted from planet to dwarf planet in 2006 we've actually discovered two new moons orbiting the icy sun satellite.
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The other satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, failed to reach orbit in February 2009, dealing a dramatic blow to climate-change researchers around the world.
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As part of this, NASA will replace the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that was lost a year ago, and which was supposed to identify the world's sources, and sinks, of carbon dioxide.
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Orbiting 440 miles above Earth, the satellite will zip around the planet 14 times a day, snapping hundreds of pictures that will be beamed back to ground stations in South Dakota, Alaska and Norway.
Couple such capability with new satellite measurements (America's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 is due to launch in a few years) and better measurements of the mass of plant life in forests and other ecosystems, and the planet's greenhouse-gas credits and debits will surely be understood far better.
The data are sent from the orbiting outpost to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which relay it to the satellite reception dishes at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
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Kearns and a team of scientists led by Alan Strong of NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service analyzed sea surface temperature data from the agency's polar-orbiting satellites from 1984 through 1996.
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