How do satellites not fall back to Earth due to gravity if they are not traveling at escape velocity?
In: Physics
So a sattelite is constantly falling to earth. It’s not falling straight down though, it is falling along a curved path since we pushed it sideways too.
Remember the earth is round so let’s imagine a ball. If we look straight down on a ball this would be like a sattelite’s perspective of the earth.
Now notice that if you move sideways from there in any direction the surface of the ball (or the ground) is lower from you than the point directly under your eyes.
So that is to say you have further to ‘fall’ if you move slightly in any direction and that distance gets bigger the further you move to the side. If we move fast enough sideways we will essentially have infinite room to fall, that’s what an orbit is, something that is falling but also moving sideways such that it will never actually get to the ground.
Fun little side note – this is why when we want to get something out of orbit and back to earth, we don’t point the rocket towards the earth we actually do a “retrograde burn”. Which means we point in the exact opposite direction we’re going sideways and just slow down so that we’ll fall back to earth with gravity (it’s way more fuel efficient).
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