JWST launched on December 25, 2021, aboard an ESA Ariane 5 rocket to the Sun-Earth L2 point, reaching about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in January 2022. Its 6.5-meter segmented gold-coated beryllium primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments, each about 1.32 meters across and roughly 20 kilograms, designed to fold for launch. JWST uses…
Read more
The Union of the Comoros comprises Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Anjouan (Ndzuwani), Mohéli (Mwali) and the Mayotte territory, with island geography that complicates terrestrial network rollout. Submarine cables have transformed connectivity: EASSy landed in Moroni in 2010–2011, AVASSA was completed in 2016, and FLY-LION3 landed at Itsandra, Moroni in 2019, creating three major international links. Internally,…
Read more
NASA’s Hyperion, launched in 2000 on the EO-1 satellite, collected 220 spectral bands from 400 to 2500 nm at 30 m resolution. A hyperspectral data cube stacks hundreds of narrow wavelength bands for every ground pixel, creating a two-dimensional spatial image plus a spectral dimension. Hyperspectral imaging records hundreds of narrow bands (often 10 nm…
Read more
As of mid-2025, Starlink is available in over 110 countries and territories. In the United States, Starlink began with limited trials in August 2020 and the public beta “Better Than Nothing Beta” in November 2020, and now has nationwide commercial coverage including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with over 2.5 million subscribers as…
Read more
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a population of over 100 million, but only about 27% were using the internet in early 2024, leaving roughly 75 million offline. <li Internet users rose from 1.4 million in 2013 to 28.9 million in 2023, with mobile internet subscribers jumping about 40% over three years. <li As…
Read more
The first space images were captured in 1946 from a sub-orbital U.S. V-2 rocket at about 105 km altitude. The first actual satellite photograph of Earth was taken on August 14, 1959 by the U.S. Explorer 6 satellite. In 1960, TIROS-1 transmitted the first television image of Earth from orbit, a milestone for weather observation.…
Read more
About 75% of the planet is obscured by cloud cover or darkness at any moment, making optical imaging inaccessible. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites actively illuminate the ground with microwave radar and synthesize a large aperture by moving the antenna to produce high-resolution images. SAR can operate day or night and in all weather, providing…
Read more
Iridium operates about 66 LEO satellites at roughly 780 km, offering truly global coverage including the poles with a one-way latency around 0.1–0.2 seconds. Inmarsat uses 3–4 GEO satellites at about 35,786 km, delivering near-global coverage (roughly ±70° latitude) with about 0.5 second latency, and IsatPhone 2 offers up to 8 hours of talk and…
Read more
Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite-based broadband internet service, and by 2025 the constellation has launched over 7,500 satellites with about 6,750 active in orbit. The satellites orbit in low Earth orbit at roughly 550 km altitude, delivering typical download speeds of 50–200+ Mbps and latency around 20–40 ms. SpaceX began launching Starlink in 2019, and by…
Read more
Traditional GEO satellite internet sends data roughly 22,000 miles to a satellite and back, yielding a round-trip latency of about 600–800 ms. Satellite internet can reach virtually anywhere with a clear view of the sky, including most of the continental United States. HughesNet uses geostationary satellites and advertises speeds up to 25 Mbps download and…
Read more
