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
Weather Star XL forecast contents. The WeatherStar XL first appeared in a beta roll-out on select cable systems in November 1998 and appeared briefly on The Weather Channel Latin America until that channel's demise. On June 26, 2014, The Weather Channel discontinued broadcasting its analog satellite feed, thus officially retiring all Weather Star units prior to the IntelliStar, including the XL. To address the need for a low-cost replacement, The Weather Channel developed in 2013 the IntelliStar 2 Jr. platform, which is capable of operating natively on both analog and digital cable systems. The Weather Star XL is a rack-mounted rendering computer, manufactured