Notes from Lecture #2: Natural Orbits

A natural orbit is the path followed by any body that moves under the influence of
gravity alone. The planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and other celestial bodies in our
solar system all move along natural orbits. Also, any spacecraft with its engines turned
off (I.e. moving under the influence of gravity alone) is following a natural orbit.

Natural orbits are not a new idea - the concept goes back over 500 years. In particular:

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543, Polish) was the first person to convince a large
readership that the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, and not vice-versa. He gave
us the right starting point.
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601, Danish - how do you pronounce his name?) died several
years before the invention of the telescope, but collected the best naked-eye
observations of the planets’ annual motions that had ever been amassed.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630, German) was Tycho Brahe’s graduate student, and after
Tycho’s death he figured out that planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular as had
been thought since antiquity.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642, Italian) was the first astronomer to use a telescope, and
found, among other things, the very first celestial bodies in orbit around another
planet, namely Jupiter.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727, English) brought it all home. He discovered the Law of
Universal Gravitation, which explains why the planets’ orbits are elliptical.

Now, of the five aforementioned names, the one you’re going to hear the most in this
course is Kepler, since Kepler’s 3 Laws of Natural Orbits (as we’ll call them) are
going to concern us closely. They apply to orbits around any source of gravity.

Kepler’s 1st Law: Natural orbits are either elliptical (closed, see Figure 1) or hyperbolic
(open, see Figure 3) in shape.

Figure 1: A Typical Elliptical Orbit

Center of Ellipse Unoccupied Focus

(Occupied Focus)

Semi-Major Axis Semi-Major Axis

Note: Elliptical orbits can be either high eccentricity or low eccentricity. The higher the
eccentricity, the more stretched out the ellipse. The lower the eccentricity, the more
circular the ellipse. See Figure 2. A special case is zero eccentricity, which corresponds
to a circular orbit. In our solar system, the planets (except Pluto) all have very low-
eccentricity orbits about the Sun; comets and asteroids can have very high-eccentricity
orbits.

Figure 2
Three elliptical orbits with the same
major axis, but different eccentricities
A: Zero eccentricity (circular)
B: Intermediate eccentricity
C: High eccentricity
A B C

Figure 3

Periapsis
A typical hyperbolic orbit has
a periapsis but no apoapsis

Source of Gravity

Note: orbits also have different inclinations - in the case of orbits in the solar system, we
measure the inclination as an angle with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit (the
ecliptic plane). The Earth’s orbital inclination is then zero degrees by definition, and the
amazing thing is that all the other planets (except Pluto) orbit the Sun in practically the
same plane, with inclinations of 7 degrees or less.
Kepler’s 2nd Law: The closer you get to periapsis, the faster you travel; the closer you
get to apoapsis, the slower you travel (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Illustration of Kepler's 2nd Law

93.5 km/s 8.8 km/s

19.0 km/s

30.9 km/s Orbit of Comet Icarus

Kepler’s 3rd Law: For an orbit about a given source of gravity, the period (time to
complete one orbit) depends only on the major axis. The bigger the major axis, the
longer the period (see Figure 5). Also, the total energy (kinetic energy + potential
energy) of an orbit also depends only on the major axis. The bigger the major axis, the
greater the total energy.

A body in orbit has two kinds of energy - kinetic energy (also known as energy of
motion) and potential energy (also known as energy of position). The faster you’re
moving, the greater your kinetic energy; the farther you are from the source of gravity,
the greater your potential energy. If you look carefully at Kepler’s 2nd Law, you’ll see
that this implies that as your potential energy increases, your kinetic energy will decrease,
and vice-versa.

The principle of conservation of energy says that although the kinetic energy and
potential energy of an orbiting body will each change, the total energy, or the sum of the
kinetic and potential energies, remains constant. We will find this extremely useful
when we look at what happens when you use rockets to change from one natural orbit to
another. Keep in mind the second part of Kepler’s 3rd Law, which relates a natural orbit’s
total energy to its major axis.
Figure 5: Illustration of Kepler's 3rd Law for the moons of Jupiter

Callisto Ganymede
16.69 days 7.16 days The four largest satellites
of Jupiter and their
Europa orbital periods
3.55 days

Io
1.77 days

(diagram not exactly to scale)

Some more facts about open vs. closed natural orbits:

An elliptical orbit
Is closed (I.e. it keeps returning to the same point and repeating)
Always has a speed less than the escape speed (the speed needed to achieve an open
orbit)
Always has a negative total energy.

A hyperbolic orbit
Is open (I.e. it passes by the source of gravity once and never returns)
Always has a speed which is greater than the escape speed
Always has a positive total energy.