They stay put for a fair while - their orbit ends up decaying sometimes as has been previously stated elsewhere, because of the action of the moon's gravity, micro-meteorites, solar wind, and other such teeny-tiny forces that can have an effect over time. Hence they send up the Space Shuttle every so often to straighten out the orbits of the more expensive satellites. :-)
Not for refulling geosynchronous satellites though as the shuttle only goes up 300Km or so (Low Earth Orbit?). unless the satellite thought "ohh, need fuel", dropped to a lower orbit, picked up some gas & then nipped bak to higher orbit? EssoSpace division :)
must find the rather cute java app showing satellites orbits, can drag it around, rotate the earth, zoom in & out, highlist specific satellites. GPS satellites on that looked like a crowd of angry flies buzzing round the earth, with LEO satellites making a close to the surface sphere, the bunch of geostationary ones making a Saturnesque ring, and things like Chandra nipping well away from Earth then zooming back :) Way to waste hours wondering : http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html
I say 'that's the best thing I've ever seen on the Internet' quite often, but honest to God I mean it in regards to this applet. I had no idea that anything so fucking amazing had been made.
I... I might have to enable Active Desktop and set this as my wallpaper. Oh God.
it *is* rather cool! Wish it did a lot more as well - imagine if it linked in a planetarium & the voyager & mariner & other probes and everything we've ever done in space ;)
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must find the rather cute java app showing satellites orbits, can drag it around, rotate the earth, zoom in & out, highlist specific satellites. GPS satellites on that looked like a crowd of angry flies buzzing round the earth, with LEO satellites making a close to the surface sphere, the bunch of geostationary ones making a Saturnesque ring, and things like Chandra nipping well away from Earth then zooming back :)
Way to waste hours wondering : http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html
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I say 'that's the best thing I've ever seen on the Internet' quite often, but honest to God I mean it in regards to this applet. I had no idea that anything so fucking amazing had been made.
I... I might have to enable Active Desktop and set this as my wallpaper. Oh God.
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Wish it did a lot more as well - imagine if it linked in a planetarium & the voyager & mariner & other probes and everything we've ever done in space ;)
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would be fun to set it to show spacecraft & satellites popping up (and disappearing :( as years go by
Sputnik, all alone...