ABSTRACT
The current situation From the pioneering work at Kettering Grammar school in the 1950s and 1960s, activity in the field of satellites in education grew slowly. Enthusiasts built their own ground-stations and collected data, sometimes just to show that the equipment actually worked. However, the pace of new initiatives and the general level of activity has risen sharply since the early 1980s. This can be traced to a number of influences. The evolution of a truly global system of telecommunications has focused attention there, and within the UK, British Telecom has developed a series of well-produced materials to explain the basis of its enterprise. Public news broadcasts have made increasing use of cloud-pattern photographs in weather forecasting and of pictures of the earth’s surface to show ecological events, both of which are produced by remote sensing satellites.
