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Die Bahnen von Erdsatelliten bestimmen

Prof. Markus Rothacher, Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zürich
Lecture in German

Today, hundreds of thousands of artificial satellites fly around the earth to fulfill scientific, commercial or military purposes. Among them are satellites, so-called CubeSat, that are as big as a truck or as small as a cube with an edge length of only 10 cm. Besides there is only exactly one giant natural satellite orbiting the Earth, namely the Moon. We show how the orbits of these Earth satellites look like and with what accuracy we can determine them. Whereas in the past we took photos of the satellites, today we use powerful laser pulses to aim at the satellites or the moon, or we equip the satellites with a GPS receiver to determine their position.