Posts tagged orbital-mechanics
I'm building a habitable world tidally locked to a red dwarf star. In order to affect a tide and other weather patterns I was going to have another planet closer to the star that has an orbital res...
My question refers to a capital ship. Ideally, the ship wants to stay as low as possible. Does the mass of the ship affect its possible orbits? If so, what is the lowest orbit possible for this shi...
A defining factor of my world is the hardships inhabitants have to face when surviving long seasons. Due to the extreme length of a year, time is largely measured by moon cycles. I need to make sur...
I've been working on a system with a habitable moon (Moon A) for a story, and I'm now trying to populate the other moons around the parent planet. I'm considering placing one (Moon B) in a co-orbi...
Is it possible for a planet to have a liquid ring rather than a ring made of solid particles? If it is, how long would it be stable for? If not, is there any other configuration of a liquid that c...
I would like to have an Earth-like planet (~Earth gravity, ~Earth day, ~Earth year, and liquid water oceans) with extreme variance in its tides. I want the lowest tide to reveal about 30 miles of f...
Is there a habitability zone between the primary and secondary stars in a binary star system for a planet orbiting only the primary star at a distance less than that of the secondary star and, if s...
Those of you who have read Game Of Thrones will know that in the GOT world seasons do not have a fixed duration, e.g., a winter might last three times longer than the previous one. I find most int...
As an ancient organism whom currently occupies a large chunk of a planet beneath the surface, I have a pesky issue with an invasive species. These humans have decided to colonize my home, mistaking...
I'm writing a story about a race that has space travel capabilities without rocket technology, instead is using a portal to space and was wondering whether it's possible for them to put something i...
How would I calculate if it is possible to have an eccentric enough orbit around a gas giant to dip the periapsis some depth(how deep?) into the atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn and...
The Emperor (may he live forever) plans to visit the Solar System on a rare royal visit in ten years' time. The Bureau for Interplanetary Tidying have decided that the Asteroid Belt is an eyesore t...
By a stable orbit I mean not getting ejected by the other planets or ejecting them, Let's create a scenario where Neptune occupies an orbit in the asteroid belt at 2.76 AU, Ceres average distance f...
Simple question that might seem odd. Not going to get too specific but I am curious, more or less, as to what it would look like for a planet that had a moon (A habital one) which was in essence ti...
I have two planets and humans live on both of them. Humans need not have developed on these planets, but the planets should support human life with the allowance that the humans have technology com...
Much of the struggle with terrestrial fusion power seems to be with keeping the ultra-hot plasma contained. In a classic Tokamak configuration, magnets using massive amounts of power, suspend the p...
Consider a planet which is entirely Earth-like. Same mass, same rotation, etc. But in this world, resource-rich objects are suspended by some phenomenon at varying altitudes up to 200km above sea l...
I've seen many questions about tides and tidal variations on a wide variety of interesting single star, multi star, single planet, binary planet, single moon, multiple moon, and even ring system co...
How many rocket launches are needed to change the axial tilt of the Earth so much that it is noticeable with instruments available today? We can assume that we are talking about the heaviest rocke...
Is it possible for an artificial satellite (in this case, an unmanned communications platform) to maintain a stable orbit directly around the barycenter of a Binary Star system, as in well inside t...
We know that Gor, or Counter-Earth, is not stable in a long-term sense. Let's handwave that away, or assume that we are dealing with a temporary span of time in which the instability is immaterial....
Many questions on this site hypothesize about two planets in close orbit of each other, each developing their own civilizations. How feasible is that? Some 4.5 billion years ago Theia, a planetary...
Would it be possible for there to be an almost torchship (essentially a very, very weak one) which could fly almost brachistochrone trajectories? So instead of a full on brachistochrone, where you ...
A light-year distant from Sol saw the collision of a massive space-born battle fleet against an awe-inspiring dreadnought. At one point in the battle, the flotilla fired rail-guns with 100 metric ...
I have been working on a sci-fi story for a little while now, and have recently discovered that I made a very big error in assuming the position of Eris. The main issue is that I had forgotten to t...
Inspired by this question: Consider a trinary star system, in which the three stars are arranged in an xy plane and all revolving the same direction, equidistant from each other. The inward pull...
Earth has stopped rotating. Maybe Superman started flying around the Earth backwards to turn back time, but hit a wall of kryptonite just when the Earth stopped rotating. Or Stupendous Man hit the ...
Suppose we begin to colonize the moon. Assuming the building materials and biological material are all imported (not taken on-site), would it be possible for the moon to become massive enough to fa...
I'm working on a flintlock fantasy series and I want to figure out how to get three comets with different orbital periods to occasionally all show up at the same time. All three are "great comets"...
Your large spaceship is damaged beyond repair. You manage to get it close enough to a planet so that you can release emergency shuttle craft. You have very little control over the ship and won't be...
I am writing a story centered around a planet orbiting a Blue Supergiant star. What I want to know is how far away a planet would have to be to be in the habitable zone of such a star. The star I ...
I know that in the past I posted questions on if specific bodies larger than the moon--Mars in one and Titan in another--but this series deals with questions regarding Earth's effects by a natural ...
On earth there can be hours where the moon is up during the same time the sun is in the sky (daytime moon) due to the combined rotation of earth and orbit of the moon. I would like to have an earth...
In my previous question, I asked how much mass the Sun would have to lose in order for Saturn's orbital velocity to be its escape velocity. The answer proved to be somewhat unexpected - when the S...
In a world I'm building - the same one as in Is space piracy orbitally practical? - there are many space stations in low Earth orbit, used as orbital spaceports, each about ten times the size of th...
Making the following assumptions: 1. The three moons of the Gas Giant are safe enough distances from and massive enough not to pull each other apart or send themselves careening into the void. 2...
I'm trying to create plausible scenario under which we could colonize Venus. Is it possible that Venus could be hit by a planetoid and the impact strips its atmosphere and makes it spin faster? ...
I have a scenario which I am too poorly knowledgeable to address, I'm hoping for some expert input. I'm currently writing a novel, in which a large section of Russia/EU continents were blown up i...
So recently I got slated for missing some glaring obvious flaws in my story on here, which I really do appreciate. I'm approaching the question from a different angle though, in two parts. What w...
I fear the math involved is beyond my capabilities on this one. I have what I consider to be more than a Layman's understanding of the physics involved, and I believe I can follow the math well en...
In my particular scenario, There is an habitable exoplanet in which the axial tilt turns to always face the system's star, and the planet is not in tidal lock, this allows for a certain range o...
The planet orbits a supermassive gas giant, almost double the size of Jupiter. But the planet orbiting it is also supposed to have rather large rings in my story. Question: Is it possible for a mo...
Suppose humans of the late 21st century or beyond began constructing a solar shield as a solution to climate change. Suppose for some reason (open to suggestions) they choose to build the shield in...
Imagine that, through some cosmic phenomena not yet understood, the Sun 'burps' and ejects a vast amount of its mass into the cosmic void. A huge coronal discharge, perhaps. A pressure bubble insid...
I'm imagining a system with a star and something like 6-8 planets. The planets' orbits are (relatively) close to each other, and all share an orbital period that is exactly the same. I.e. the len...
I'm writing a science fiction story set on a moon orbiting a gas giant. I want to understand how the world's day night cycle would appear from its surface and how the world might be affected by thi...
Science-based answers, please. Key points: the main concern is radiation protection for sustainability of human life (and accompanying plant and animal life ecosystems, whether earth-like or n...
The Karman Line is one of the most commonly-used definitions of the "edge of space". As an airplane flies higher in the atmosphere, the air gets thinner and thus the lift decreases. This can be c...
The scenario is based on the fact that a tight binary of two neutron stars does not hold for long: The two bodies lose energy in the form of gravitational waves and they spiral towards each other a...
My planet is very Earth-like with a day length of 26.87h. The moon has a radius of about 1550km, a mass of $5.2\times10^{22}$ kg and orbit 45500 km from the center of planet. My scenario is that t...
