Weather satellite of rotation and its elliptical orbit kept it from collecting a notable amount of useful data. The Explorer VI and VII satellites also contained weather-related experiments. The first weather satellite to be considered a success was TIROS-1, launched by NASA on April 1, 1960. TIROS operated for 78 days and proved to be much more successful than Vanguard 2. TIROS paved the way for the Nimbus program, whose technology and findings are the heritage of most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA and NOAA have launched since then. Beginning with the Nimbus 3 satellite in 1969, temperature information through the tropospheric
NBC Weather Plus 2008. Afterwards until the network formally ceased operations, it ran only a loop of various national satellite, radar and temperature maps accompanied by music, local weather maps inserted by the network's affiliates, and "Weather Plus University". With this, the remaining on-camera meteorologists from Weather Plus were referred to on other NBC News and MSNBC programs as only "NBC meteorologists," before eventually being mentioned as being part of the Weather Channel's staff. The Weather Channel's main Atlanta staff also began appearing on NBC News programs, either from the cable channel's Atlanta headquarters, NBC's New York City operations or via satellite on-location