satellite

Launched from STS-51
The Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), a significant activity of the NASA Space Communications Program, provided for the development and flight test of high-risk, advanced communications satellite technology. Using multiple spot beam antennas and advanced on-board switching and processing systems, ACTS pioneered new initiatives in communications satellite technology. NASA Glenn Research Center was responsible for the development, management, and operation of ACTS as part of a long legacy of experimental communications satellites.

Launched from STS-51
The Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), a significant activity of the NASA Space Communications Program, provided for the development and flight test of high-risk, advanced communications satellite technology. Using multiple spot beam antennas and advanced on-board switching and processing systems, ACTS pioneered new initiatives in communications satellite technology. NASA Glenn Research Center was responsible for the development, management, and operation of ACTS as part of a long legacy of experimental communications satellites.

ORBCOMM provides satellite data services, As of August 18, 2009, ORBCOMM reported 500,000 billable subscriber communicators on the company's U.S.-based gateway control center. ORBCOMM has control centers in the United States, Brazil, Japan, and Korea, as well as U.S. ground stations in New York, Georgia, Arizona, and Washington State, and international ground stations in Curaçao, Italy, Australia, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Argentina, Morocco, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia. Plans for additional ground station locations are under way.
Orbcomm is best suited for users who send very small amounts of data. To avoid interference, terminals are not permitted to be active more than 1% of the time, and thus they may only execute a 450ms data burst twice every 15 minutes. The latency inherent in Orbcomm's network design prevents it from supporting certain safety-critical applications.

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) program designs, builds, launches, and maintains several near polar orbiting, sun synchronous satellites monitoring the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments.
Each DMSP satellite monitors the atmospheric, oceanographic and solar-geophysical environment of the Earth. The visible and infrared sensors collect images of global cloud distribution across a 3,000 km swath during both daytime and nighttime conditions. The coverage of the microwave imager and sounders are one-half the visible and infrared sensors coverage, thus they cover the polar regions above 60 degrees on a twice daily basis but the equatorial region on a daily basis. The space environmental sensors record along track plasma densities, velocities, composition and drifts.

commemorative

The SeaWinds on QuikSCAT mission is a "quick recovery" mission to fill the gap created by the loss of data from the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), when the satellite it was flying on lost power in June 1997. 
The QuikSCAT (Quick Scatterometer) is an earth-observing satellite that provided estimates of wind speed and direction over the oceans to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others. This "quick recovery" mission intended to replace the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), which failed in June 1997. The satellite launched on 19 June 1999 with an intended mission of two or three years. QuikSCAT, however, continued to operate for a decade and stopped working circa 23 November 2009, when the bearings in the motor of the spinning antenna failed.

NOAA-I continues the third-generation operational, polar orbiting, meteorological satellite series operated by the National Environmental Satellite Service (NESS) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA-I continues the series of Advanced TIROS-N (ATN) spacecraft begun with the launch of NOAA-8 (NOAA-E) in 1983. NOAA-I will be in an afternoon equator-crossing orbit and is intended to replace the NOAA-11 (NOAA-H) as the prime afternoon spacecraft. The goal of the NOAA/NESS polar orbiting program is to provide output products used in meteorological prediction and warning, oceanographic and hydrologic services, and space environment monitoring. The polar orbiting system complements the NOAA/NESS geostationary meteorological satellite program (GOES). The NOAA-I Advanced TIROS-N spacecraft is based on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Block 5D spacecraft and is modified version of the TIROS-N spacecraft (NOAA1-5). 

Launch team for FUSE
The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) is a space-based telescope operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. FUSE was launched on a Delta II rocket on June 24, 1999, as a part of NASA's Origins program. FUSE detected light in the far ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, between 90.5-119.5 nanometres, which is mostly unobservable by other telescopes. Its primary mission was to characterize universal deuterium in an effort to learn about the stellar processing times of deuterium left over from the Big Bang. FUSE resides in a low Earth orbit, approximately 760 km (410 nmi) in altitude, with an inclination of 25 degrees and just less than a 100 minute orbital period. Its Explorer designation is Explorer 77.

Launched from STS-51
The Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), a significant activity of the NASA Space Communications Program, provided for the development and flight test of high-risk, advanced communications satellite technology. Using multiple spot beam antennas and advanced on-board switching and processing systems, ACTS pioneered new initiatives in communications satellite technology. NASA Glenn Research Center was responsible for the development, management, and operation of ACTS as part of a long legacy of experimental communications satellites.

February 1980

During Labor Day weekend in 1973, a meeting of about 12 military officers at the Pentagon discussed the creation of a Defense Navigation Satellite System (DNSS). It was at this meeting that "the real synthesis that became GPS was created." Later that year, the DNSS program was named Navstar. With the individual satellites being associated with the name Navstar (as with the predecessors Transit and Timation), a more fully encompassing name was used to identify the constellation of Navstar satellites, Navstar-GPS, which was later shortened simply to GPS

October 1978

Inmarsat plc (LSE: ISAT) is a British satellite telecommunications company, offering global, mobile services. It provides telephone and data services to users worldwide, via portable or mobile terminals which communicate to ground stations through eleven geostationary telecommunications satellites. Inmarsat's network provides communications services to a range of governments, aid agencies, media outlets and businesses with a need to communicate in remote regions or where there is no reliable terrestrial network.

The ACRIMSAT Mission will measure Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) during its five-year
mission life. The ACRIMSAT spacecraft, carrying the ACRIM III instrument, will be secondary payload on a
Taurus vehicle scheduled to launch in December 1999.