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Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics , and described by Isaac Newton in his first law of motion (also known as The Principle of Inertia). [ 1 ]
Alignment with the Earth's axis is the only direction for which the gyroscope's spinning axis can be stationary with respect to the Earth and not be required to change direction with respect to inertial space. After being spun up, a gyrocompass can reach the direction of alignment with the Earth's axis in as little as a quarter of an hour. [55]
The scalar moment of inertia, , of a body about a specified axis whose direction is specified by the unit vector ^ and passes through the body at a point is as follows: [7] = ^ (= []) ^ = ^ ^ = ^ ^, where is the moment of inertia matrix of the system relative to the reference point , and [] is the skew symmetric matrix obtained from the vector =.
Newton's laws are often stated in terms of point or particle masses, that is, bodies whose volume is negligible. This is a reasonable approximation for real bodies when the motion of internal parts can be neglected, and when the separation between bodies is much larger than the size of each.
The moments of inertia of a mass have units of dimension ML 2 ([mass] × [length] 2). It should not be confused with the second moment of area, which has units of dimension L 4 ([length] 4) and is used in beam calculations. The mass moment of inertia is often also known as the rotational inertia, and sometimes as the angular mass.
Inertia / Moment of ... that is in the same direction as the resultant ... wording of the metre's definition was proposed: "The metre, symbol m, is the ...
This provides a definition for the moment of inertia, which is the rotational equivalent for mass. In more advanced treatments of mechanics, where the rotation over a time interval is described, the moment of inertia must be substituted by the tensor that, when properly analyzed, fully determines the characteristics of rotations including ...
The inertia matrix is composed of the moments of inertia of a body calculated with respect to separate coordinate axes (e.g. x, y, z). If an object is asymmetric about its principal axis of rotation, the moment of inertia with respect to each coordinate direction will change with time, while preserving angular momentum.