Fun! A quick space question – about as basic as they get – to see how much you know about space. The answer is after the Author's Notes, which mostly contains notes by the author.
Fun!
Sneaky late evening update today, just because. Hmm, also not a great page. Coincidence? This will be the only update for this week, unfortunately. The page buffer is still recovering from my update splurges the last couple of months, and it will probably be another couple of weeks before I'm comfortable enough with where the buffer is at that I can go back to regularly doing multiple updates per week.
In other news, the Drunk Duck Awards are less than a week away (assuming everything's on schedule). So grab your tickets, have your popcorn and swear jar handy, and enjoy the show!
Mmmkay, so back to the Space Quiz! Most of you are probably scratching your heads, and wondering why would I ever ask such an obvious and stupid question. But I'm sure a handful of you (you don't need to “out” yourselves) at least had to pause and think for a moment (“Damn, I'm sure I know this! Umm… jeez, gotta think back to fourth grade!”). I was shocked and disgusted to learn a disturbing and somewhat dubious survey had found that 1 out of 4 Americans don't know the Earth orbits around the sun. It made me wonder just how much other basic stuff people don't know. I was actually embarrassingly far along in school before I learned how orbital mechanics work. It had just never occurred to me to find out, and they didn't teach it in any of my classes.
So, even if you didn't already know the answer, a couple of the choices should have set off red flags. If the International Space Station were too far away for Earth's gravity to pull on it, then how the heck does the moon stay up there? It's waaaay further away from us than the ISS. In fact, the International Space Station is only about 350 kilometers above the Earth most of the time, and experiences about 90 percent as much gravity as you feel on the Earth's surface. As for Answer C, I'm guessing it would run out of fuel after a few hours tops doing it that way, so that obviously wouldn't work either. So of course, the only possible answer is
The space station – and all the manmade satellites, and the moon – stays in orbit because it's moving with enough velocity parallel to the Earth's surface that, even though gravity is trying to pull it “down” into their mutual gravitational barycenter, its falling trajectory is such that it never actually strikes the Earth. If it slows down enough, the orbit decays and it goes ker-splat, and if it speeds up enough, the elliptical orbit opens up into a parabola and it flies off into space.
In case you're wondering – and why wouldn't you be! – the International Space Station is moving at a velocity of about 7.67 kilometers per second (km/s), roughly 27,600 km per hour. The Earth orbits the sun at 29.78 km/s (107,200 km/h), and the sun is orbiting the galactic center at 230 km/s (828,000 km/h).
Super basic space stuff, that you should know. And if you didn't, now you do. See you next week!
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