Space Speed

486 viewsOtherPlanetary Science

So, a car against asphalt it’s pretty easy determinining the speed.
But when someone says a spaceship, for example Voyager, travels at about 61.5 kkm/h. What speed are we comparing against? According to Google, Earth rotates at the equator at about 1.5 kkm/h. So if we said that we compare Voyager speed vs Quito speed and assuming angle of Voyager vs Quito is 90 degrees then that should be +- 1.5 kkm/h?
And Earth itself is also according to Google running around the sun at a clip of about 107 kkm/h so that would mean that at some points Voyager is doing -40 kkm/h vs Earth.

Just standing “still” in the Universe some shit would be moving really really fast compared to me so where do we flip reference points?

edit: lost a couple of ks

In: Planetary Science

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

> someone says a spaceship, for example Voyager, travels at about 61.5 kkm/h.

Nobody says that. There’s no such thing as kkm/h. Thousands of kilometres per hour would be Mm/h, but nobody says that either. They say 61,500 km/h or 17.1 km/s.

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