The most famous are the Landsat series.

How do Satellites work? If you want to send something like a TV broadcast from one side of Earth to the other, there are three stages involved. October 15, 2019. Uplinks and downlinks. The most famous are the GPS NAVSTAR satellites. The most obvious questions that come to mind are: Why are these satellites in totally different orbits? We live our lives knowing that many satellites orbit our planet everyday, and that they are helping us in several ways. Satellites communicate by using radio waves to send signals to the antennas on the Earth.

How do communications satellites work?

Rescue satellites respond to radio distress signals (read this page for details). Communications satellites are "space mirrors" that can help us bounce radio, TV, Internet data, and other kinds of information from one side of Earth to the other. What do they do?

Earth observation satellites check the planet for changes in everything from temperature to forestation to ice-sheet coverage. How satellites work A satellite is basically a self-contained communications system with the ability to receive signals from Earth and to retransmit those signals back with the use of a transponder —an integrated receiver and transmitter of radio signals.

Since Sputnik, several nations, led predominantly by the United States, Russia and China, have sent some 2,500 satellites into space [source: National Geographic].

Others might fit … You might be surprised to know that there are almost 4,900 satellites orbiting the earth. Navigational satellites help ships and planes navigate.

Some of these man-made objects, such as the International Space Station, are massive.