Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The principles of flight dynamics are used to model a vehicle's powered flight during launch from the Earth; a spacecraft's orbital flight; maneuvers to change orbit; translunar and interplanetary flight; launch from and landing on a celestial body, with or without an atmosphere; entry through the atmosphere of the Earth or other celestial body ...
Superior planets: Planets whose orbits lie outside the orbit of Earth. [nb 1] Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune: Trojan planet: A planet co-orbiting with another planet. The discovery of a pair of co-orbital exoplanets has been reported, but later retracted. [3] One possibility for the habitable zone is a trojan planet of a gas giant close to ...
"Inferior planet" refers to Mercury and Venus, which are closer to the Sun than Earth is. "Superior planet" refers to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (the latter two added later), which are further from the Sun than Earth is. The terms are sometimes used more generally; for example, Earth is an inferior planet relative to Mars.
Earth orbits the Sun, making Earth the third-closest planet to the Sun and part of the inner Solar System. Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon .
A total of 4,341 such planets have been identified as of 28 Jan 2021. Super-Earth – exoplanet with a mass higher than Earth's, but substantially below those of the Solar System's ice giants. Mini-Neptune – also known as a gas dwarf or transitional planet. A planet up to 10 Earth masses, but less massive than Uranus and Neptune.
The distance separating the planet and its star is just 7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, and the planet receives 1.6 times more energy from its star than Earth does from the Sun.
Diagram showing the eastern and western quadratures of a superior planet like Mars. In spherical astronomy, quadrature is the configuration of a celestial object in which its elongation is a right angle (90 degrees), i.e., the direction of the object as viewed from Earth is perpendicular to the position of the Sun relative to Earth.
Developmental Ephemeris or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Developmental Ephemeris (JPL DE) is a widely used model of the solar system, which combines celestial mechanics with numerical analysis and astronomical and spacecraft data. Dynamics of the celestial spheres concerns pre-Newtonian explanations of the causes of the motions of the stars and ...