Think of orbital regimes as floors in a building: each floor has different tradeoffs in coverage, speed, latency, and drag. Knowing which floor a satellite occupies tells you a lot about what it's doing before you know anything else.
Think of orbital regimes as floors in a building: each floor has different tradeoffs in coverage, speed, latency, and drag. Knowing which floor a satellite occupies tells you a lot about what it's doing before you know anything else.
Roughly 160–2,000 km altitude. The most populated region of orbital space — and the most dynamic.
Roughly 2,000–35,786 km. Sparsely populated but critically important — this is where global navigation lives.
Exactly 35,786 km above the equator. The altitude where orbital period matches Earth's rotation — one orbit per sidereal day.
Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) is a subset of LEO — but its behaviour is distinct enough to deserve separate treatment.
Equatorial at 35,786 km = comms or weather. SSO at 500 km = Earth observation. 20,000 km inclined = navigation. These heuristics won't catch everything — but they're right the vast majority of the time, and they're readable directly from a single TLE.