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
Space weather with other primary missions have carried auxiliary instruments for solar observation. Among the earliest such spacecraft were the Applications Technology Satellite (ATS) series at GEO that were precursors to the modern Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) weather satellite and many communication satellites. The ATS spacecraft carried environmental particle sensors as auxiliary payloads and had their navigational magnetic field sensor used for sensing the environment. Many of the early instruments were research spacecraft that were re-purposed for space weather applications. One of the first of these was the IMP-8 (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform) It orbited the Earth at 35 Earth Radii and