News

SpaceX launched a mystery satellite to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) from Florida's Space Coast early Sunday morning ...
If we know the orbital speed and orbital distance for any object, we can find the mass of the thing it's orbiting. This matches up with my Media Tip Number 2: It's Better to Say Nothing Than Be ...
Orbital mechanics can be a bit counter-intuitive. We have to slow down an orbiting space craft to convert kinetic energy for gravitational energy. The orbital altitude is raised at its highest point ...
Thanks to atomic clocks (and all the worldly forces that influence them), scientists know that Earth's rotation has begun to ...
All told, the Earth spirals away from the Sun at a rate of about 1.5 cm every year, causing its orbital speed to drop by about 3 nanometers-per-second over that timescale.
The BOLers were talking about the astronaut that dropped a tool bag in space. Rafe said: *"everything in orbit is moving at the same speed"*. The idea behind his statement is mostly correct - but ...
To see why it is so difficult with ordinary rockets, here is a quick refresher on orbits. If you could throw a ball from above our atmosphere, gravity still pulls it down in the same way as on Earth.
Atmospheric density varies naturally as objects orbit the Earth, leading to some normal variances in orbital speed, which makes the debris catalog so useful. It could provide a global average picture, ...