I imagine that sometimes things that are put into orbit and intended to stay there sometimes overshoot their mark and the earth just flies by leaving whatever it was in deep space.
Or maybe that never happens?
In: Technology
Not really; we deliberately set up satellites into their orbits such that they’ll broadly stay in orbit. The only way for an object to “escape” like this would be for gravity to just randomly stop functioning for brief periods, which doesn’t happen.
Satellites *do* have to take steps to remain in orbit, but the problem isn’t keeping up with Earth, but rather taking steps to ensure they don’t fall back to Earth as their orbits decay due to very very light interactions with Earth’s atmosphere.
Never happens. Takes a lot of energy or deltaV to leave earths orbit. Think about it. You gotta go out pass the moon to leave earths orbit. The moon is in earths orbit.
Things in orbit do get orbital decay. They slow down a little over time due to hitting particles and radiation in space, need little boosts here and there to stay in the correct orbits.
But one time they did lose a 100 million dollar probe to Mars cuz a bunch of really smart people forgot to convert metric to imperial.
Not unless the engineers are really really bad at their math. To escape Earth’s gravity completely you need to go at ~11 km/s. A low-earth orbit insertion requires about 7-8ish km/s. Unless you accidentally design your rocket to have an extra 3-4 km/s delta-v (which is REALLY hard to do, even if you’re specifically trying to do it), your satellite is staying in orbit.
In short, it’s really hard to actually leave Earth’s gravity. It’s not something that just happens accidently.
Satellites do eventually fall out of orbit. Escape velocity is how fast an object must travel in order to escape the gravitational pull of a particular object. The earth’s escape velocity is about 25,000 miles per hour, so something must travel at this speed to escape the gravitational pull of the earth.
Satellites that orbit the earth are traveling at nowhere close to the earth’s escape velocity. This is why they stay in orbit. The earth’s gravitational pull is stronger than the velocity of the satellite, so the satellite will never escape the pull of the earth.
As the satellite moves away from the earth, it slowly slows down. This is because the earth’s gravitational pull is weaker the further you get from it. The satellite will eventually slow down to the point where the gravitational pull of the earth is stronger than the velocity of the satellite.
At this point, the satellite will fall back into the earth’s atmosphere and burn up.
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