X-Nico

5 unusual facts about orbit


National Launch System

A NASA history from 1998 offers that reusable Single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rockets and space planes such as the DC-X and X-33 seemed attainable and represented smaller, simpler alternatives to the sprawling Shuttle program.

Reaction Engines Limited

The company conducts research into space propulsion systems, centred on the development of the Skylon re-usable SSTO spaceplane.

Science Realm

Science Realms predecessor Science Dawn was a classified program to build a rocket-launched supersonic horizontal-take off horizontal-landing (HOTOL) SSTO spaceplane.

Shcramjet

A Shock-Induced Combustion Ramjet Engine (abbreviated as Shcramjet; also called Oblique Detonation Wave Engine (ODWE), or simply referred to as Shock-Ramjet Engine) is a new concept in airbreathing ramjet engines, proposed to be used for hypersonic, as well as, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) propulsion applications.

Single stage

Single-stage-to-orbit, a vehicle which reaches orbit from the surface of a body without jettisoning hardware


171 Ophelia

A 1979 study of the Algol-like light curve produced by this asteroid concluded that it was possible to model the brightness variation by assuming a binary system with a circular orbit, a period of 13.146 hours, and an inclination of 15° to the line of sight from the Earth.

2010 KQ

It was given the asteroid designation 2010 KQ by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who identified its orbit as being very similar to that of the Earth.

5D/Brorsen

The next serious search was started by Brian Marsden, who believed the comet had faded out of existence, but computed the orbit for a very favorable 1973 apparition.

70 Ophiuchi

In 1855, Capt. W. S. Jacob of the Madras Observatory of the East India Company claimed that the orbit of the binary showed an anomaly, and it was "highly probable" that there was a "planetary body in connection with this system".

Aegospotami

This meteorite is believed to have been dislodged from a near-Earth orbit by the passing Halley's Comet.

Alan Stern

They use the camera to search for a hypothetical group of asteroids (Vulcanoids) between the orbit of Mercury and the Sun that are so elusive and hard to see that scientists aren't sure they exist.

Alastair Burnet

Sir James William Alexander Burnet, known as Sir Alastair Burnet (12 July 1928 – 20 July 2012), was a British journalist and broadcaster, best known for his work in news and current affairs programmes, including a long career with ITN as chief presenter of the flagship News at Ten for eighteen years; Sir Robin Day described Burnet as "the booster rocket that put ITN into orbit".

Beta Pictoris

In 2000, observations made with the Advanced Meteor Orbit Radar facility in New Zealand revealed the presence of a stream of particles coming from the direction of Beta Pictoris, which may be a dominant source of interstellar meteoroids in our solar system.

Carl Gustav Witt

He discovered two asteroids, most notably 433 Eros, the first known asteroid with an unusual orbit occasionally approaching the Earth's (today it is classified as an Amor asteroid).

Cartoon Orbit

To comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Cartoon Orbit instead had a list of pre-written words and phrases that players could send in a chat box.

Center for Studies and Research in Aeronautical Medicine

Because of its relevance in the field of medicine, it was visited in 1965 by Col. John Glenn, USAF, the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth.

Command module

The Apollo Command Module, the crew cabin of the Apollo Command/Service Module, used in the Apollo program to send men to the Moon and low Earth orbit, designed specifically to return through the atmosphere to a water landing

Crab Nebula

The exact time of the comet's return required the consideration of perturbations to its orbit caused by planets in the Solar System such as Jupiter, which Clairaut and his two colleagues Jérôme Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute carried out more precisely than Halley, finding that the comet should appear in the constellation of Taurus.

David J. Eicher

The asteroid, a main belt object in orbit between Mars and Jupiter, was discovered by astronomer Brian A. Skiff at Lowell Observatory’s Anderson Mesa Station in 1984 and the citation was proposed and written by astronomer David H. Levy.

Delta 3000

The partial failure was due to the premature cutoff of the first stage, which left the Dynamics Explorer spacecraft in a lower orbit than planned.

Earth to orbit

However they all suffer from a low Mass fraction, reducing their effectiveness for transporting payloads into orbit.

Earth's orbit

In 1989, Jacques Laskar's work showed that the Earth's orbit (as well as the orbits of all the inner planets) is chaotic and that an error as small as 15 metres in measuring the initial position of the Earth today would make it impossible to predict where the Earth would be in its orbit in just over 100 million years' time.

First Orbit

First Orbit is a feature-length, experimental documentary film about Vostok 1, the first manned space flight around the Earth.

Frank K. Edmondson

Nearly 7000 photographic plates for asteroid orbit studies were taken with a 10-inch astrographic camera at the Goethe Link Observatory.

Graviton

For example, a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions.

Gravity assist

STEREO: a gravity-assisted mission which used Earth's Moon to eject two spacecraft from Earth's orbit into heliocentric orbit

Inflatable space habitat

Bigelow recently announced that it has agreements with six sovereign states to utilize on-orbit facilities of the commercial space station: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Sweden.

Jennifer Fallon

She is published by Snapping Turtle Books worldwide, in addition to some titles through Voyager Books in Australia, Tor and Random House in the United States, Orbit in the UK, AST in Russia, Heyne and Egmont in Germany and Luitingh Fantasy in The Netherlands.

Julian day

The Modified Julian Date (MJD) was introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to record the orbit of Sputnik via an IBM 704 (36-bit machine) and using only 18 bits until August 7, 2576.

Kuiper belt

The scattered disc was created when Neptune migrated outward into the proto-Kuiper belt, which at the time was much closer to the Sun, and left in its wake a population of dynamically stable objects that could never be affected by its orbit (the Kuiper belt proper), and a population whose perihelia are close enough that Neptune can still disturb them as it travels around the Sun (the scattered disc).

LAPCAT

HOTOL (1986–88 design for single-stage-to-orbit reusable winged launch vehicle to use an air-breathing engine)

Lisa Hayes

After a miscalculated fold maneuver transported the SDF-1 and Macross City past the orbit of Pluto, Lisa time and again saved the ship with her quick thinking and actions, as well as her continuous attention to detail and duty as First Officer.

Marine isotope stage

The theoretical advances and greatly improved data available by the 1970s enabled a "grand synthesis" to be made, best known from the 1976 paper Variations in the earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages (in Science), by J.D. Hays, Shackleton and John Imbrie, which is still very widely accepted today, and covers the MIS timescale and the causal effect of the orbital theory.

Melody Oliveria

After receiving many comments about the effects, she produced a video titled My Webcam, explaining how the effects were achieved using a Logitech Quickcam Orbit MP.

National Launch System

The National Launch System (or New Launch System) was a study authorized in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush to outline alternatives to the Space Shuttle for access to Earth Orbit.

NEAR Shoemaker

The primary goal of the mission was to study the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros from orbit for approximately one year.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous - Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker), renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year.

Numerical digit

They used this system to make advanced astronomical calculations, including highly accurate calculations of the length of the solar year and the orbit of Venus.

PerkinElmer

Due to a miscalibrated null corrector, the primary mirror was also found to have a significant spherical aberration after reaching orbit on STS-31.

Project Orbiter

The primary cause for the VfR's gaining world wide appeal was due to the writings of mathematician Hermann Oberth who detailed, in a 1923 publication entitled The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, the mechanics of placing a satellite into Earth orbit.

Quantum Apocalypse

During routine administration at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Dr. Rhodes discovers that a comet has suddenly veered off its orbit and smashed into Mars.

RAF Feltwell

This data along with that from other systems was used to adjust the orbits of various satellites and manned vessels (for instance the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station) to reduce the risk of on-orbit collisions.

Randolph Bresnik

This marked the second time a space traveller became a parent while in orbit; it first happened when Franz Viehböck's daughter was born while he was in space in 1991.

Ray Herman

Orbit's titles included The Westerner (featuring Wild Bill Pecos), Love Diary, Patches and Wanted Comics, and contributing artists included Syd Shores, Bernard Krigstein and Mort Leav.

Ray, North Dakota

Mary Sherman Morgan, inventor of Hydyne, which was combined with liquid oxygen to propel the first US rocket into orbit (1958)

Redstone Arsenal

At a 1954 meeting of the Spaceflight Committee of the American Rocket Society, von Braun proposed placing a satellite into orbit using the Redstone with clusters of small solid-fuel rockets on top.

Remon Magar

It is Egyptian Arts Group ’s first project which enjoyed success, being run for 3 times on all major Egyptian TV Channels including Cairo Centric, CBC, Al Haya TV, Dream TV, Mehwar and Orbit.

Serv

Chrysler SERV, a single-stage to orbit rocket design submitted for the Space Shuttle contest

Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicle

The National Launch System was a study authorized in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush to outline alternatives to the Space Shuttle for access to Earth Orbit.

Star trail

American astronaut Don Pettit recorded star trails with a digital camera from the International Space Station in earth orbit between April and June, 2012.

Stellar parallax

It is clear from Euclid's geometry that the effect would be undetectable if the stars were far enough away, but for various reasons such gigantic distances involved seemed entirely implausible: it was one of Tycho Brahe's principal objections to Copernican heliocentrism that in order for it to be compatible with the lack of observable stellar parallax, there would have to be an enormous and unlikely void between the orbit of Saturn and the eighth sphere (the fixed stars).

Türksat 4A

According to the in-orbit delivery contract signed in early 2011, Mitsubishi Electric (MELCO) of Japan is constructing the satellite's base Spacebus MELCO DS2000, and the American-Russian joint-venture company International Launch Services (ILS) will provide the launch of the spacecraft atop a Russian Proton-M space launch vehicle from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan scheduled on February 10,2014.

Verlet integration

It was also used by Cowell and Crommelin in 1909 to compute the orbit of Halley's Comet, and by Carl Størmer in 1907 to study the motion of electrical particles in a magnetic field.

William Ruddiman

It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of rises and falls that had accurately characterized their past long-term behavior, a pattern which is well explained by natural variations in the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch cycles.

Xi Ursae Majoris

It was the first visual double star for which an orbit was calculated, when it was computed by Félix Savary in 1828.


see also