The Meteor craft are weather observation satellites launched by the USSR. The Meteor satellites were designed to monitor atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures, humidity, radiation, sea ice conditions, snow-cover, and clouds.Meteor-3 was launched on August 15, 1991 from Plesetsk, Russia, and failed on 27th December 1994. Meteor-3 carried the second Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) aloft as the first and the last American-built instrument to fly on a Soviet spacecraft.