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--- blog:articles:general:orbital_shenanigans [2019/02/22 11:14] – ↷ Page moved from blog:articles:orbital_shenanigans to blog:articles:general:orbital_shenanigans Phil Ide
+++ blog:articles:general:orbital_shenanigans [2019/03/06 10:37] – Phil Ide
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 Unfortunately, because of the wild variance in the Martian gravity field, maintaining station in a geostationary orbit around Mars turns out to be very difficult. It is simply too easy to begin sliding off-station. It would just be too much effort.
-So, back to the drawing board. Let’s tackle this another way. Another orbit, what you might call a ‘regular’ orbit, doesn’t have this problem. At least, not so much. One suggestion was to use a lower orbit at an elevation of 5,000km. Consider that at the geostationary orbit (13,634km), the satellite can see 30 degrees of the planet either side of the point it is above. That’s a 60 degree spread. At 5,000km, this reduces, but not by too much. This is important, so hang on to that information.
+So, back to the drawing board. Let’s tackle this another way. Another orbit, what you might call a ‘regular’ orbit, doesn’t have this problem. At least, not so much. One suggestion was to use a lower orbit at an elevation of 5,000km. Consider that at the geostationary orbit (17,215km), the satellite can see 30 degrees of the planet either side of the point it is above. That’s a 60 degree spread. At 5,000km, this reduces, but not by too much. This is important, so hang on to that information.
 A 5,000km orbit has a period of approx 0.26 days (that’s Earth days, not Martian ones, which are about half an hour longer). Using my orbital calculator, I finessed the orbit down to 4,781.361km. That gives it an orbital period of 6hrs 9mins and 53secs. If you do the sums in your head, you’ll see that four orbits come to approximately 24hrs 39 mins 35 secs – the same as a Martian day. So now we have exactly four orbits per day.
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 So, yeah. I went with it.
+~~socialite~~
 ~~DISCUSSION~~