Why do Earth satellites stay up? · HackerPapers discussions

Why do Earth satellites stay up? — mentioned by antognini

Sat, 25 May 2019 19:28:22 GMT

One of my favorite papers asks the opposite question: Why do Earth satellites stay up? https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5244 It turns out that the orbit of most satellites would be unstable were it not for the quadrupole moment of the Earth's gravitational field which detunes certain orbital resonances.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Why do Earth satellites stay up? — mentioned by antognini

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 18:59:13 GMT

If you'd like to start looking at three-body problems, you might be interested in studying the Kozai-Lidov mechanism. It's a really fascinating subject, so much so that I did my dissertation on it! Here's a really good paper (one of my all time favorites) to get you started: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5244

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Why do Earth satellites stay up? — mentioned by antognini

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 15:44:14 GMT

We are actually very fortunate that the Earth is not very spherical, because without that satellites on the high inclination orbits like the polar orbits and the Molinya orbits would crash into the Earth. Due to perturbations of the Moon, high inclination orbits have a tendency to be pushed from low eccentricity to very high eccentricity. (This is known as the Kozai-Lidov mechanism.) However, the fact that the Earth's gravitational potential is not exactly spherical (it has a quadrupole moment) makes these orbits precess, and this precession happens to be fast enough to suppress the…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.