History
At the end of 1928 the Austro-Hungarian rocket engineer Herman Potočnik set out a plan for a breakthrough into space and the establishment of a permanent human presence there. He conceived a space station in detail and was the first man to calculate the geostationary orbit, on which the station would orbit the Earth.
Author Arthur C. Clarke is credited with proposing the notion of using a geostationary orbit for communications satellites. The orbit is also known as the Clarke Orbit. Together, the collection of artificial satellites in these orbits is known as the Clarke Belt.
The first communications satellite placed in a geosynchronous orbit was Syncom 2, launched in 1963. However, it was in an inclined orbit, still requiring the use of moving antennas. The first communications satellite placed in a geostationary orbit was Syncom 3. Geostationary orbits have been in common use ever since, in particular for satellite television.
Geostationary satellites also carry international telephone traffic but they are being replaced by fiber optic cables in heavily populated areas and along the coasts of less developed regions, because of the greater bandwidth available and lower latency, due to the inherent disconcerting delay in communicating via a satellite in such a high orbit. It takes electromagnetic waves about a quarter of a second to travel from one end to the other end of the link. Thus, two parties talking via satellite are subject to about a half second delay in a round-trip message/response sequence.
Although many populated land locations on the planet now have terrestrial communications facilities (microwave, fiber-optic), even undersea, with more than sufficient capacity, telephony and Internet access is still available only via satellite in many places in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, as well as isolated locations that have no terrestrial facilities, such as Canada's Arctic islands, Antarctica, the far reaches of Alaska and Greenland, and ships at sea.
Read more about this topic: Geosynchronous Orbit
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)