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A rotating earth and an oscillating pendulum

Already in the 19th century the French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault used the pendulum that now bears his name to prove that the earth rotates around its own axis. The subject of earth rotation has immediate implications for planning and carrying out space missions, particularly those involving earth observation from satellites. Satellite orbit planes, just like a pendulum's plane of oscillations, are fixed in space. Only by exploiting Earth's rotation and selecting a polar orbit can a satellite like TerraSAR-X, whose data are received in Neustrelitz, monitor the entire surface of our home planet.

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