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The orbit of a planet around the Sun is an ellipse, with the Sun in one of the focal points of that ellipse. [This focal point is actually the barycenter of the Sun-planet system; for simplicity, this explanation assumes the Sun's mass is infinitely larger than that planet's.] The planet's orbit lies in a plane, called the orbital plane. The ...
In the end stages of planet formation, a planet, as so defined, will have "cleared the neighbourhood" of its own orbital zone, i.e. removed other bodies of comparable size. A large body that meets the other criteria for a planet but has not cleared its neighbourhood is classified as a dwarf planet. This includes Pluto, whose orbit intersects ...
Geosynchronous orbit. A geosynchronous orbit (sometimes abbreviated GSO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds (one sidereal day ). The synchronization of rotation and orbital period means that, for an observer on Earth's surface, an object in ...
One complete orbit takes 365.256 days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth has traveled 940 million km (584 million mi). Ignoring the influence of other Solar System bodies, Earth's orbit, also known as Earth's revolution, is an ellipse with the Earth-Sun barycenter as one focus with a current eccentricity of 0.0167. Since this value is ...
Space of Medium Earth orbits (MEO) as pink area, with Earth and the distance of the orbit of the Moon for reference and to scale. A medium Earth orbit ( MEO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an altitude above a low Earth orbit (LEO) and below a high Earth orbit (HEO) – between 2,000 and 35,786 km (1,243 and 22,236 mi) above sea level. [1]
A Sun-synchronous orbit ( SSO ), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, [1] is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. [2] [3] More technically, it is an orbit arranged so that it precesses through one complete revolution each year, so it ...
A circular orbit is an orbit with a fixed distance around the barycenter; that is, in the shape of a circle . In this case, not only the distance, but also the speed, angular speed, potential and kinetic energy are constant. There is no periapsis or apoapsis. This orbit has no radial version .
e. In astrodynamics, the orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a dimensionless parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 is a circular orbit, values between 0 and 1 form an elliptic orbit, 1 is a parabolic escape orbit (or capture orbit), and greater than ...