Satellites And Gravity Readworks
You may have heard the story of how isaac newton discovered gravity.
Satellites and gravity readworks. At an altitude of 100 km you would be so high that you would see black sky and stars if you looked upwards. These satellites used radar altimeters to measure the height of the sea surface from which free air gravity was calculated. Geosat and ers 1 which flew in the 1980s and 1990s. However if the satellite is given speed in any direction horizontal to the surface of the earth it will.
Access thousands of high quality free k 12 articles and create online assignments with them for your students. Grace short for gravity recovery and climate experiment is a nasa mission consisting of twin satellites that were launched in 2002. As the legend goes newton was sitting under an apple tree when all of a sudden an apple dropped from the tree and fell on his head. If you took a satellite to this height and released it it would still fall towards the earth because the force of gravity is nearly the same as it is at the earth s surface.
Nasa s aqua satellite for example requires about 99 minutes to orbit the earth at about 705 kilometers up while a weather satellite about 36 000 kilometers from earth s surface takes 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete. Get ascii file of gravity anomaly or topography. This incident made him wonder why the apple fell toward the. The satellites are in the same orbit around earth one about 220 kilometers 137 miles in front of the other at an altitude of 460 kilometers 286 miles above the earth s surface.
The satellites are placed 220kms apart and orbit 500kms above earth. White paper in support of a high resolution ocean altimeter mission. As the legend goes newton was sitting under an. Access thousands of high quality free k 12 articles and create online assignments with them for your students.
Ftp the raw gravity data 1 minute grid 540mbytes exploring the ocean basins with satellite altimeter data. Until recently gravity maps of the world s oceans and continental margins relied on the data generated from two geodetic mission satellites. The maps below have been sectioned into 16 clickable regions. As satellites get closer to earth the pull of gravity gets stronger and the satellite moves more quickly.
Extensive investigation has since been carried out by the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics using data collected by satellites during the gravity recovery and climate experiment grace between 2002 and 2006.