eli5 how are satellites placed in just the right spot so they dont fall to earth or drift into space?
In: Planetary Science
It’s a lot simpler than one might think. It drifting off into space won’t happen unintentionally. It’s constantly pulled towards earth. It can only drift off if you cancel that pull, and using an engine is the only practical way to do that. I.e. you’d have to actively thrust away from earth quite intently for a long time to get away.
Not having it drop down on earth just requires it to have sufficient speed perpendicular to earth. As long as nothing is slowing it down, like atmosphere, it’ll just keep going round and round. If you accidentally make it move too fast, it’ll just get a slightly higher orbit, and if it’s too slow it’ll just be lower. The only disastrous scenario is if it’s so slow that the orbit gets low enough to start interacting with the atmosphere, which will slow it down even more.
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