During the Apollo moon landings how was the lunar lander able to slow down enough to land on the moon? And then speed up enough to connect back up to the orbiter? Let alone getting into the same orbit. All movies show this in slow motion and makes it look easy.
In: Planetary Science
The moon is much smaller than earth, which makes its gravity much weaker, which means you go much slower to orbit it.
As an example Apollo’s lunar orbital speed was 3,600 mph. The speed of low earth orbit is 17,895 mph.
Sure that’s fast, but nowhere near as fast as Earth orbit and so much easier to achieve with a small rocket.
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