watched a video. professor stated that the viking stole energy from saturn (through orbit and assisted energy transfer) in order to complete its trajectory.
In: Physics
Satellites are making a negligible difference here so we can safely ignore those. The Moon is the major cause of loss via the tides–that large-scale movement of water exerts a small drag on the Earth’s rotation and causes it to slow down. It’s a tiny effect–it’ll take tens of thousands of years to slow the planet’s rotation by a single second–but it’s sapping rotational kinetic energy nonetheless.
The Earth is losing energy to the Moon, but not to satellites.
Because the Earth turns faster than the Moon rotates around the Earth, our tidal bulge leads the Moon. That tugs on it like someone pulling a kite string. The Moon moves out about an inch per year and in consequence the Earth’s rotation slows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration
Now, the Voyager (not Viking) craft did fly-bys that accelerated them outward. Like a baseball hitting a swinging bat, they came out of the encounter with more energy than they started with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
Edit: voyager not viking.
All those satellite have no value in the equation? .0001 x 1 mm should amount to something no?
Imagine you tie a bucket of water to your waist with two ropes, directly in front of you.
One rope is tied on your front, closest to the bucket. The other in your back, furthest from the bucket.
Now you start spinning/roaring on the spot while someone also picks up the bucket and runs around you in a circle. They don’t go _quite_ as fast as you, so the ropes start pulling on you, creating torque, slowing your rotation.
The moon does the same thing to the earth with gravity, pulling on the ocean closest to it and furthest from it, which is what we call tides.
Also, smaller satellites aren’t big enough to generate enough gravity to really effect this. The earth _almost_ just shrugs them off.
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