Apogee kick motor possible. The mass of most geostationary satellites at the beginning of its operational life in geostationary orbit is roughly half that when it separated from its vehicle in geostationary transfer orbit, with the other half having been fuel expended in the apogee kick maneuver. Apogee kick motor An apogee kick motor (AKM) refers to a rocket motor that is regularly employed on artificial satellites to provide the final impulse to change the trajectory from the transfer orbit into its final (most commonly circular) orbit. For a satellite launched from the Earth, the rocket firing is done at the highest point
Word (computer architecture) was the 36-bit word, which is also a good size for the numeric properties of a floating point format. After the introduction of the IBM System/360 design, which used eight-bit characters and supported lower-case letters, the standard size of a character (or more accurately, a byte) became eight bits. Word sizes thereafter were naturally multiples of eight bits, with 16, 32, and 64 bits being commonly used. Early machine designs included some that used what is often termed a "variable word length". In this type of organization, a numeric operand had no fixed length but rather its end was detected