How Do Satellites Fly?
The word satellite originally meant ‘co-traveler’ or ‘traveling companion’, and was first attributed to natural bodies orbiting planets such as the Moon, for example, which is Earth’s satellite. Currently, the word satellite is mostly used to describe man-made instruments orbiting the Earth, while moons circling planets are called natural satellites. The vast majority of the satellites are put into the orbit with the help of rockets and are designed to carry out military missions, weather forecasts, scientific studies or telecommunication transmission. Incredible as it may seem, the first artificial satellite put into Earth’s orbit was not an American one, but a soviet satellite, and had the role of studying the upper layers of the atmosphere. At first, the U.S. scientists thought that the announcement made by the Russians was a joke; however, when they detected the radio signals sent back to Earth by Sputnik 1, they realized that they had greatly underestimated the scientific communit
