Frozen orbit
Imagine you are playing catch with a friend who is standing still, and you want to throw the ball to them in a way that the ball just keeps going around them. You might throw it with just the right velocity and direction, so that the ball is always being pulled towards your friend by gravity, but it is also moving in just the right way that it keeps missing your friend and never actually hits them.
This is kind of like a frozen orbit! It's a special path that a satellite or spacecraft can take around a planet (or moon) where it is moving just fast enough that gravity always pulls it back towards the planet, but it is also moving in a way that it never gets too close or too far away. It's like the perfect balance of forces, keeping the spacecraft in a stable path.
One really cool thing about frozen orbits is that they can be used to keep an eye on things on the planet's surface. Since the satellite stays in the same general area above the planet, it can keep monitoring the same spot on the ground over and over again. This is really useful for things like weather forecasting, mapping, or even spying on other countries (but that's not very nice, so we won't talk about it too much).
Overall, frozen orbits are just a really neat way that we can use physics and math to design spacecraft trajectories that allow us to explore and study our solar system in new and exciting ways!
This is kind of like a frozen orbit! It's a special path that a satellite or spacecraft can take around a planet (or moon) where it is moving just fast enough that gravity always pulls it back towards the planet, but it is also moving in a way that it never gets too close or too far away. It's like the perfect balance of forces, keeping the spacecraft in a stable path.
One really cool thing about frozen orbits is that they can be used to keep an eye on things on the planet's surface. Since the satellite stays in the same general area above the planet, it can keep monitoring the same spot on the ground over and over again. This is really useful for things like weather forecasting, mapping, or even spying on other countries (but that's not very nice, so we won't talk about it too much).
Overall, frozen orbits are just a really neat way that we can use physics and math to design spacecraft trajectories that allow us to explore and study our solar system in new and exciting ways!