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Ignoring the influence of other Solar System bodies, Earth's orbit, also called Earth's revolution, is an ellipse with the Earth–Sun barycenter as one focus with a current eccentricity of 0.0167. Since this value is close to zero, the center of the orbit is relatively close to the center of the Sun (relative to the size of the orbit).
The Earth's orbit approximates an ellipse. Eccentricity measures the departure of this ellipse from circularity. The shape of the Earth's orbit varies between nearly circular (theoretically the eccentricity can hit zero) and mildly elliptical (highest eccentricity was 0.0679 in the last 250 million years). [7] Its geometric or logarithmic mean ...
In astrodynamics or celestial mechanics, an elliptic orbit or elliptical orbit is a Kepler orbit with an eccentricity of less than 1; this includes the special case of a circular orbit, with eccentricity equal to 0. In a stricter sense, it is a Kepler orbit with the eccentricity greater than 0 and less than 1 (thus excluding the circular orbit).
The eccentricity of Earth's orbit is currently about 0.016 7; its orbit is nearly circular. Neptune's and Venus's have even lower eccentricities of 0.008 6 and 0.006 8 respectively, the latter being the least orbital eccentricity of any planet in the Solar System.
Geosynchronous orbit (GSO): An orbit around the Earth with a period equal to one sidereal day, which is Earth's average rotational period of 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds. For a nearly circular orbit, this implies an altitude of approximately 35,786 kilometers (22,236 mi).
From a circular orbit, thrust applied in a direction opposite to the satellite's motion changes the orbit to an elliptical one; the satellite will descend and reach the lowest orbital point (the periapse) at 180 degrees away from the firing point; then it will ascend back. The period of the resultant orbit will be less than that of the original ...
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci. Kepler's first law placing the Sun at one of the foci of an elliptical orbit Heliocentric coordinate system (r, θ) for ellipse.
For a satellite orbiting the Earth directly above the Equator, the plane of the satellite's orbit is the same as the Earth's equatorial plane, and the satellite's orbital inclination is 0°. The general case for a circular orbit is that it is tilted, spending half an orbit over the northern hemisphere and half over the southern.