In case you watch sci-fi films, you’d assume that flying a spaceship is rather like driving a barely extra difficult automobile (or a Winnebago in Spaceballs). And George Lucas gave us these galactic battles with pilots who seem like they’re flying fighter jets on Earth.
Effectively, dangerous information: House is actually, actually totally different. Particularly, shifting a car in orbit round Earth is far more difficult than that. The maneuvers you would possibly make with a aircraft typically have the alternative impact in orbit.
To see what I imply, we’ll first simply seize some fundamental physics and construct ourselves a bit of mannequin of orbital mechanics, after which I’ve some cool simulations of an tried docking maneuver. Learn on!
Round Orbits
Think about flying in a round orbit round Earth. There are three large physics concepts we have to perceive this sort of movement. First, centripetal acceleration. Recall that acceleration is a measure of how briskly the speed of an object modifications.
However velocity isn’t simply velocity, it’s velocity in a specific path—in different phrases, it’s a vector. If an object is shifting in a circle, its path is consistently altering, which implies it’s consistently accelerating, even when its velocity is fixed!
The path of this acceleration is towards the middle of the circle. (“Centripetal” means center-pointing.) The magnitude of the acceleration relies on each the magnitude of the speed (v), i.e., the velocity, and the radius (r) of the circle. This provides the next equation:
Courtesy of Rhett Allen
