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Where do you think the "gravitational pull of the earth" ends? Hint: the moon is inside the gravitational pull of the earth... The danger is that things in or
by evgen 9y ago
Where do you think the "gravitational pull of the earth" ends? Hint: the moon is inside the gravitational pull of the earth... The danger is that things in orbit have velocity. A lot of velocity. Taking that nice F=mv^2 equation in mind you can imagine what would happen if a piece of space junk were to hit something we care about (or hit something we don't care about and create a lot more little pieces of junk that are now spreading out to cause more mayhem.) Space is big, and earth orbit is also a very big place, but there is still a lot of junk whizzing around up there and increasing the odds that something you forgot about will hit something you care about is counter-productive.
- tajen 9y agoI wonder as well what is the zone he’s talking about, but he talked about the zone in 9m/s2, not F=mv^2. I guess the first one extends up to 100km altitude, where I think geostationary satellites are, and indeed is very closeby. Edit : Low earth orbit is 180+km, for weather satellites because they revolve in 99 minutes. Geostationary orbit seems to be around 36000km with a speed of 3000m/s. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OrbitsCatalog/ https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OrbitsCatalog/
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoJust to emphasize: There is no limit to the earth's gravitational pull. The formula is F=G*sqrt(m1m2)/r^2. So as r (the distance between the center of the earth and your satellite) increases, F decreases. But it never hits zero. Though after a while (a Sun-Earth L point, is it?), the influence of the sun will be greater (by orders of magnitude) than the earths.
- liuhenry 9y agoFor most interplanetary missions, Earth's gravitational pull on spacecraft can be modeled as a sphere of influence of about 1 million km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodyna...