How fast satellite

To stay in orbit, a satellite has to travel at a very high velocity, which depends on the height. So, typically, for a circular orbit at a height of km above the Earth's surface, a speed of 7. At this speed, the satellite will complete one orbit around the Earth in 90 minutes. This is similar to someone throwing a cricket ball or baseball. The harder the ball is thrown, the further it will travel before it reaches the ground. It only takes a minute to sign up.

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The lowest orbit has the fastest speed.

But below km orbits decay very fast, km within 6 month, km in about a day. So a very elliptical orbit has the fastest speed, but only when close to Earth at minimal height.

But the period gets much longer and the average speed is lower. The last line is an elliptical orbit to the moon and back. This speed record is held by the Apollo missions. For simplicity, the orbit was calculated without the influence of the Moon. All orbits were calculated using this webpage by Bernd Leitenberger.

It is only available in German. Computing the velocity of all space objects at perigee can provide the answer. After processing the latest public satellite catalog from Celestrak, the objects with the highest orbital speed at perigee are:. You can download the satcat as a csv from this link , and you can use this Python code snippet below to process the file and compute the speeds. I wrote a Python script to calculate some orbital periods and speeds.

If the units of the results are wrong, the numbers may be wrong too. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Observe that this acceleration is slightly less than the 9. As discussed in Lesson 3 , the increased distance from the center of the earth lowers the value of g.

The period of the moon is approximately Determine the radius of the moon's orbit and the orbital speed of the moon. Like Practice Problem 2, this problem begins by identifying known and unknown values.

These are shown below. By taking the cube root of 5. Either equation can be used to calculate the orbital speed; the use of equation 1 will be demonstrated here. The substitution of values into this equation and solution are as follows:. A geosynchronous satellite is a satellite that orbits the earth with an orbital period of 24 hours, thus matching the period of the earth's rotational motion.

A special class of geosynchronous satellites is a geostationary satellite. A geostationary satellite orbits the earth in 24 hours along an orbital path that is parallel to an imaginary plane drawn through the Earth's equator. Such a satellite appears permanently fixed above the same location on the Earth. If a geostationary satellite wishes to orbit the earth in 24 hours s , then how high above the earth's surface must it be located?

Just as in the previous problem, the solution begins by the identification of the known and unknown values. This is shown below. The unknown in this problem is the height h of the satellite above the surface of the earth. Yet there is no equation with the variable h. The solution then involves first finding the radius of orbit and using this R value and the R of the earth to find the height of the satellite above the earth.

The radius of orbit can be found using the following equation:. By taking the cube root of 7. The radius of orbit indicates the distance that the satellite is from the center of the earth.

Now that the radius of orbit has been found, the height above the earth can be calculated. Since the earth's surface is 6. So the height of the satellite is 3. A satellite is orbiting the earth. Which of the following variables will affect the speed of the satellite? The orbital radius is in turn dependent upon the height of the satellite above the earth.