If a satellite is brought into a stable orbit around another body, it should keep orbiting, right?
In: Physics
It’s just a rotating system with a huge store of kinetic energy, like a big flywheel. The common definition of a perpetual motion machine is one that energy can be extracted from without using up an energy reservoir, however large, that eventually runs out. Even a body as large as a planet loses energy eventually. Collisions with occasional dust and gas, tidal forces that squeeze and stretch the body such as those that have already slowed the rotation of the moon so one side faces us and is infinitesimally doing the same to the Earth.
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