Satellite Orbit Calculator

Results: Overwrite Append
Satellite altitude kilometers Use offical GM (μ) = 3.986x10^14 instead of calculating it
Don't touch the bits below unless you know what you're doing
g at Equatorial sea level (as experienced i.e including centripetal/fugal force) m/s2
Equatorial radius kilometers
Year length in daysdays
Day length in seconds seconds = hr min sec
Show intermediate results

Disclaimers and notes

Changing g, Equatorial radius etc. probably only makes sense if you are an SF writer playing with other worlds. For earth orbits use the calculated GM and ignore the rest
Common orbits: LEO is 100-1000km e.g. ISS is 380km. MEO is 5000-10000km, Geostationary is c.36000 km (see below)
This is probably not accurate to anything like the number of DP I report, but it is pretty good. When not using the precalculated GM, if you use the numbers for a geostationary orbit (35786km) with g etc. copied from statistics for earth leads to an orbital time just over 1 minute off (under 0.1%)
Note that a geostationary orbit lasts 1 sidereal day (86164 seconds not 86400)
It assumes a circular orbit above the equator
The rods from the gods calculation is done via numerical crunching with time step intervals of 0.01s because I'm damned if I can hack the algebra to figure it out that way


© 2008 Francis Turner
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