When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When Johannes Kepler made the intuitive leap in the early 1600s to realize that planetary orbits ...

Artistic impression of European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS) system (not to scale). These satellites work in GEO and relay data to and from non-GEO satellites, spacecraft, and stations that aren’t ...

Before we dive in, let’s do a quick review to appreciate what it actually means for an object to be in orbit. As Isaac Newton’s famous first law of motion states, an object in motion will stay in ...