4 ms·
This feels like it would violate the hairy ball theorem, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
by semi-extrinsic 8y ago
This feels like it would violate the hairy ball theorem, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
- MertsA 8y agoNo, for one you can only orbit in an ellipse around the center of mass. You can only "comb" in a direction that takes you around the middle of the ball. The major difference though, is that you can have overlapping orbits. There is no way to cover the entire surface without overlapping because of this, but you can still cover everything if you're willing to pay a price in efficiency by having portions of the constellation shade one another.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoHmm, but it feels like a good tradeoff in marginal increase in total energy caught versus marginal decrease in efficiency would get you pretty far from 100% coverage.
- adrianN 8y agoThe satellites of the swarm don't have be at the same distance from the star and the orbits can overlap.