The following passage is titled "Where Do Old Satellites Go When They Die?" by NASA. Like every other machine, satellites do not last forever. Whether their job is to observe weather, measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or point away from Earth to study the stars, eventually all satellites grow old, wear out, and die, just like old washing machines and vacuum cleaners. So what happens when a trusty satellite's time has come? These days there are two choices, depending on how high the satellite is. For the closer satellites, engineers will use its last bit of fuel to slow it down. That way, it will fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. The second choice is to send the satellite even farther away from Earth. It can take a lot of fuel for a satellite to slow down enough to fall back into the atmosphere. That is especially true if a satellite is in a very high orbit. For many of these high satellites, it takes less fuel to blast it farther into space than to send it back to Earth.