Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The planet Jupiter is a slight oblate spheroid with a flattening of 0.06487. The oblate spheroid is the approximate shape of rotating planets and other celestial bodies, including Earth, Saturn, Jupiter, and the quickly spinning star Altair. Saturn is the most oblate planet in the Solar System, with a flattening of 0.09796. [5]
Thus, geodesy represents the figure of the Earth as an oblate spheroid. The oblate spheroid, or oblate ellipsoid, is an ellipsoid of revolution obtained by rotating an ellipse about its shorter axis. It is the regular geometric shape that most nearly approximates the shape of the Earth. A spheroid describing the figure of the Earth or other ...
Figure 1: Coordinate isosurfaces for a point P (shown as a black sphere) in oblate spheroidal coordinates (μ, ν, φ). The z-axis is vertical, and the foci are at ±2. The red oblate spheroid (flattened sphere) corresponds to μ = 1, whereas the blue half-hyperboloid corresponds to ν = 45°.
In geophysics, geodesy, and related areas, the word 'ellipsoid' is understood to mean 'oblate ellipsoid of revolution', and the older term 'oblate spheroid' is hardly used. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] For bodies that cannot be well approximated by an ellipsoid of revolution a triaxial (or scalene) ellipsoid is used.
The WGS 84 datum surface is an oblate spheroid with equatorial radius a = 6 378 137 m at the equator and flattening f = 1 ⁄ 298.257 223 563. The refined value of the WGS 84 gravitational constant (mass of Earth's atmosphere included) is GM = 3.986 004 418 × 10 14 m 3 /s 2. The angular velocity of the Earth is defined to be ω = 72.921 15 × ...
For a Maclaurin spheroid of eccentricity greater than 0.812670, [3] a Jacobi ellipsoid of the same angular momentum has lower total energy. If such a spheroid is composed of a viscous fluid (or in the presence of gravitational radiation reaction), and if it suffers a perturbation which breaks its rotational symmetry, then it will gradually elongate into the Jacobi ellipsoidal form, while ...
Earth radius (denoted as R 🜨 or R E) is the distance from the center of Earth to a point on or near its surface. Approximating the figure of Earth by an Earth spheroid (an oblate ellipsoid), the radius ranges from a maximum (equatorial radius, denoted a) of nearly 6,378 km (3,963 mi) to a minimum (polar radius, denoted b) of nearly 6,357 km (3,950 mi).
Vincenty's formulae are two related iterative methods used in geodesy to calculate the distance between two points on the surface of a spheroid, developed by Thaddeus Vincenty (1975a). They are based on the assumption that the figure of the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and hence are more accurate than methods that assume a spherical Earth, such ...