How do satellites remain in orbit? Is there ever a risk that they will crash down to Earth?

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  • Most satellites stay in orbit by constantly managing nearly miss the thing they happen to be orbiting. As you’ve probably figured out, stuff around a fair sized object (ok, really, any object in space, but we’ll focus on ones with nice big gravatational fields) tend to head toward each other. The trick to orbiting is to get up enough speed and just the right angle to swing right past what you’d normally be headed towards and thus just miss, a lot.

    Now, since this is space and there’s generally not a lot out there, most objects can keep that sort of thing up for quite some time, provided they’re high enough up. Getting stuff up that high is tricky and expensive though, so most stuff only gets up to what’s called “Near Earth” orbits. The problem here is that there is stuff that occasionally slows down the orbiting satellite. This can be the very thin remains of the atmosphere, other satellites and all sorts of other bits of junk. When a satellite slows down enough, it sort of stops missing the planet. So to answer your question, yes, they do occasionally come crashing down.

    The good news is that they’re going so fast and are small enough that it’s not like you’re going to get one coming through your bedroom window. They usually burn up in the atmosphere long before they show up in the garden. Plus, the folks that own those things generally don’t want to pay to replace someone’s subaru, so the actually aim the things to land in the ocean. (Figure if you aim for the Pacific, you’ve got thousands of uninhabited kilometers you can plop into and not even startle a sardine.)

  • They remain in orbit because Earth’s gravity is pulling on them, but they are moving so quickly that instead of falling to Earth, they continue to “miss” the Earth.

    In an ideal situation, gravity is the only thing at work, there no other forces are in the system. Practically, however, there are several things that can make a satellite fall to Earth – Collision with various debris, and an Orbital speed which is not quite enough are the typical reasons.

  • the following link explains every minutest detail about satellites:

    http://science.howstuffworks.com/satelli…

    Source(s):
    http://science.howstuffworks.com/satelli…

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