how exacly are scientists in NASA calculating orbits of their satelites?

Question

For example, lets say NASA wants to send a satelite aroud a moon,

if they want this spacecraft to be in a certain orbit, they need to know at what speed it needs to be moving; how are they going to calculate that speed?

by using Newton’s equations or by using some special relativity equations?

In: 26

Answer 1

You usually design an orbit around what you want to study on the body’s surface. From there, you can determine the orbit with three angles or latitude, longitude, and desired altitude of the satellite.

In simple cases or as a starting point, you’d put the above in a form such that you can use Kepler’s Laws to actually build the orbit. After building these “Keplerian Parameters,” you can use Newton’s method to calculate something called the orbital true anomaly, which is going to give the ideal orbital trajectory.

In practice, most orbits are unstable, so you’d either design the orbit around its gravitational potential or design a simple orbit (using Kepler) where you occasionally burn fuel to correct your trajectory.

This is a pretty high-level explanation since it’s ELI5, but this is essentially how it works.