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Orbital mechanics or astrodynamics is the application of ballistics and celestial mechanics to the practical concerning the motion of rockets, satellites, and other spacecraft. The motion of these objects is usually calculated from Newton's laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation .
Astrodynamics is the term used to describe the application of Newtonian mechanics to human-made objects in space, such as rockets and spacecraft. It is a subfield of celestial mechanics and ballistics .
In astrodynamics, the characteristic energy is a measure of the excess specific energy over that required to just barely escape from a massive body. The units are length 2 time −2, i.e. velocity squared, or energy per mass.
Keplerian elements parameters can be encoded as text in a number of formats. The most common of them is the NASA / NORAD "two-line elements" (TLE) format, [4] originally designed for use with 80 column punched cards, but still in use because it is the most common format, and 80-character ASCII records can be handled efficiently by modern databases.
The general form of characteristic energy can be computed as: = where is the orbital velocity when the orbital distance tends to infinity. Note that, since the kinetic energy is , C 3 is in fact equal to twice the magnitude of the specific orbital energy, , of the escaping object.
In astrodynamics, the vis-viva equation is one of the equations that model the motion of orbiting bodies.It is the direct result of the principle of conservation of mechanical energy which applies when the only force acting on an object is its own weight which is the gravitational force determined by the product of the mass of the object and the strength of the surrounding gravitational field.
In astrodynamics a gravity assist maneuver, gravitational slingshot or swing-by is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial body to alter the trajectory of a spacecraft, typically in order to save propellant, time, and expense.
The name celestial mechanics is more recent than that. Newton wrote that the field should be called "rational mechanics". Newton wrote that the field should be called "rational mechanics". The term "dynamics" came in a little later with Gottfried Leibniz , and over a century after Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace introduced the term celestial ...