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Posts tagged orbit

orbit

orbit published on 2 Comments on orbit

despite what some hollywood movies where rockets fly up and miraculously start floating around tell you, almost all spaceships and satellites that stay in space are in an orbit. if you’re not orbiting a planet/moon/star you’re probably either flying away from it, or about to crash into it.

another way to think of this is spaceships don’t experience “zero gravity”, but “zero g-force”. right now you are experiencing 1g of g-force, because gravity is pushing you into the ground. if you jumped into the air you would feel 0g of g-force… until you hit the ground.

a spaceship in orbit never hits the ground, so it constantly experiences 0g. essentially it is falling… forever.

vulcan

vulcan published on No Comments on vulcan

i really need to stop trying to explain complex relativity concepts in like two panels. i can barely fit the text.

interestingly the guy who speculated about the existence of vulcan wasn’t just any random astronmer. it was urbain le verrier, who used the exact same method to predict the existence of neptune based on the orbit of uranus in 1846. so statistically speaking when he said “there might be a planet here”, until then he was right 100% of the time.

mariner 10

mariner 10 published on No Comments on mariner 10

nasa’s mariner 10 was the first probe to ever visit mercury, making 3 flybys of mercury in 1974-75. the next one was nasa’s “messenger”, which orbited mercury from 2011-15, gathering much more detailed data of the planet. the third mission, europe & japan’s “bepicolombo” is on its way to mercury right now, and will make its first flyby this year on october 2, and then enter mercury’s orbit in 2025. get hyped people!

unfortunately we’ve never soft-landed on the planet and there currently aren’t any plans to. we have crashed into it though, which is something i guess. (rip messenger)

phases

phases published on No Comments on phases

a fun consequence of the phases thing is the closer the inner planets are to earth, the less of them is visible. while venus, the closer of the two, is at its brightest during its crescent phase when it’s near earth, mercury is actually at its brightest during its full phase, when its furthest from earth. this makes mercury the only planet in the solar system to technically get brighter the further away from us it is, which is pretty weird.

earthrise

earthrise published on No Comments on earthrise

fact: anything you can completely cover with your thumb does not at all matter (i.e. literally everything if you stand back far enough). it’s called the jim lovell principle, and it’s definitely a real thing that i didn’t make up just now. ◑.◑

maybe this is why sedna never lets dini get more than a few steps away from her. (´ω｀*)

soyuz

soyuz published on No Comments on soyuz

confusingly, the soyuz is both the name of the rocket and the spacecraft, the latter of which has had 148 crewed missions as of this post (more than the space shuttle’s 135), with the first one being in 1966! if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, the russians say, especially when you’re working on a soviet budget.

there’s something so kerbal about landing in the middle of the desert with a single enormous parachute and tiny landing rockets firing just before touchdown to soften the impact. spare a thought for boris volynov, who rode soyuz 5 in 1969 when its parachute tangled and landing rockets failed, resulting in the spacecraft hitting the ground so hard it broke volynov’s teeth.