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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.
The blue path in this image is an example of a hyperbolic trajectory. A hyperbolic trajectory is depicted in the bottom-right quadrant of this diagram, where the gravitational potential well of the central mass shows potential energy, and the kinetic energy of the hyperbolic trajectory is shown in red. The height of the kinetic energy decreases ...
Orbital decay is a gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies at their closest approach (the periapsis) over many orbital periods.These orbiting bodies can be a planet and its satellite, a star and any object orbiting it, or components of any binary system.
In astrodynamics, the inclination can be computed from the orbital momentum vector (or any vector perpendicular to the orbital plane) as = | | where is the z-component of . Mutual inclination of two orbits may be calculated from their inclinations to another plane using cosine rule for angles .
The mathematical statement of the three-body problem can be given in terms of the Newtonian equations of motion for vector positions = (,,) of three gravitationally interacting bodies with masses :
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.