Earth & SkyGreek → English
Geosynchronous
/ˌdʒiːoʊˈsɪŋkrənəs/adjective
Orbiting the Earth once per rotation of the Earth, so that the satellite returns to the same point in the sky each day.
The Greek roots
γῆ
gê
earth, land
σύν
sýn
together, with
χρόνος
khrónos
time
Literally: “keeping earth-time together”
The story of the word
Arthur C. Clarke described the orbit in a 1945 magazine article; the word arrived with the hardware, in the early 1960s. Syncom 3 reached the orbit in 1964 and relayed the Tokyo Olympics live across the Pacific. Three Greek pieces stacked to describe a piece of engineering that requires an altitude of 35,786 km and nothing else.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1960s
Same family
geologysynchronizechronologygeography
In a sentence
Weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit stare at the same hemisphere all day.
The dish never moves because the satellite it points at is geosynchronous.