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Mars comes closer to Earth more than any other planet save Venus at its nearest—56 million km is the closest distance between Mars and Earth, whereas the closest Venus comes to Earth is 40 million km. Mars comes closest to Earth every other year, around the time of its opposition, when Earth is sweeping between the Sun and Mars. Extra-close ...
The Mars time of noon is 12:00 which is in Earth time 12 hours and 20 minutes after midnight. For the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Phoenix, and Mars Science Laboratory missions, the operations teams have worked on "Mars time", with a work schedule synchronized to the local time at the landing site on Mars, rather than the ...
Representative porkchop plot for the 2005 Mars launch opportunity (horizontal axis: departure dates in mm/dd notation, vertical axis: arrival dates (mm/dd)) A given blue contour represents a solution with a constant C 3. The center of the porkchop is the optimal solution for the lowest C 3.
Orbital position vector, orbital velocity vector, other orbital elements. In astrodynamics and celestial dynamics, the orbital state vectors (sometimes state vectors) of an orbit are Cartesian vectors of position and velocity that together with their time () uniquely determine the trajectory of the orbiting body in space.
Orbit determination has a long history, beginning with the prehistoric discovery of the planets and subsequent attempts to predict their motions. Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahe's careful observations of Mars to deduce the elliptical shape of its orbit and its orientation in space, deriving his three laws of planetary motion in the process.
The spacecraft would approach Mars on a hyperbolic orbit, and a final retrograde burn would slow the spacecraft enough to be captured by Mars. Friedrich Zander was one of the first to apply the patched-conics approach for astrodynamics purposes, when proposing the use of intermediary bodies' gravity for interplanetary travels, in what is known ...
In astrodynamics, an orbit equation defines the path of orbiting body around central body relative to , without specifying position as a function of time.Under standard assumptions, a body moving under the influence of a force, directed to a central body, with a magnitude inversely proportional to the square of the distance (such as gravity), has an orbit that is a conic section (i.e. circular ...
A space vehicle's flight is determined by application of Newton's second law of motion: =, where F is the vector sum of all forces exerted on the vehicle, m is its current mass, and a is the acceleration vector, the instantaneous rate of change of velocity (v), which in turn is the instantaneous rate of change of displacement.