I struggle to recall myself. I'm sure its a perfectly harmless little side issue that means little at all.
Christian memories are such unreliable things. This orbit question is something that Stripe felt he could draw my blood on. He is the one who was interested enough that he pinged me on it several times over the past few months. But now, suddenly, he considers it just a “harmless little side issue”. I wonder why the change of heart?
Once the satellites are put into place their mass is not a factor. Getting them into that place requires a differing amount of energy depending on their mass. Change the mass of one suddenly and its velocity will change to compensate (maintaining the orbit). Change the mass without changing the velocity and something needs to give. This is grade school stuff, Phy.
Maybe you failed grade school. You should have been a student of a physics Prof that I had years ago. He would intentionally provide excess information in test problems. Then he analyzed not only our answers, but how we got them. If we had mastered the material, we would use only the information that was necessary. Those students that were a bit more shaky in their understanding sometimes got the right answer, but it was by a roundabout backdoor method using the unneeded data. Their grades were lowered since they had demonstrated they did not recognize what was pertinent to the problem, and what was not.
Now listen carefully this time, Grasshopper. We are discussing how an apple’s orbit compares with the moon’s.
We start with the moon in orbit, going around and around and around the earth. We figure out where it will be when. We are not concerned with how it got in that orbit. Maybe it condensed directly out of a cloud of space dust. Maybe it was ejected from the earth in some ancient impact. Maybe it was captured as it wandered by. Maybe God thought that would be a neato orbit to put it in. Maybe it is a piece of alien trash that they left behind. Doesn’t matter.
Now I put in a call to Darth Vader Intergalactic Demolition. I promise to deliver ten clones of Carrie Fisher if they will use their death star to vaporize the moon. Zap, it is gone. A bit of dust, a flash of light, a disturbance in Yoda’s “Force”, but no more moon.
Next I hop a plane to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and then on to Moscow. In Fort Wayne I pick a really nice apple from one of Johnny Appleseed’s last trees. In Moscow I pay to have the apple put in orbit – in the same place with the same speed that the moon would have had if it hadn’t been vaporized. I leave it purely up to the Russians as to how they get it up there. They might send it up on the next ICBM test. Maybe they put it in the next cosmonaut’s lunch box. Maybe they make the world’s biggest slingshot. Maybe they take it out past Pluto first. I don’t care, and don’t even want to know. I just want a phone call telling me the apple is in orbit.
Then I watch that apple go around and around and around the earth. I am interested in watching to see if the apple maintains the same orbit the moon had been in for so long.
The one thing we are not doing in any way is transferring the energy from the massive moon to that poor defenseless little apple. Got it?
Looks like you're in desperate search of anything to hide the fact that you're wrong. If you're right just show me how I'm wrong and I'll happily concede. But as it stands I have my common sense and an independent orbital modeller backing me up. You have a lot of restatements, arm waving and mud stirring, 6 months of inactivity and a couple of inarticulate atheists to back you up.
Yup, the common sense of someone who has a tenuous understanding of physics, and an orbital modeling tool that you are assiduously avoiding answering a simple question about how to meaningfully set it up.
Let me hold your hand a bit on the use of your tool. Some good values for seeing what the moon’s orbit looks like:
body 1 (earth)
mass = 100
x and y Positions = 0, and x and y velocities = 0
body 2 (moon)
mass = 1.2
x Position = 160
y Position = 0
x velocity = 0
y velocity = 80
Slide the accuracy control fully to “accurate”.
This will give an orbit that closely scales to the moon’s orbit. Stripe should make a screen capture of that for later use.
Now let’s go to the apple orbit. The only change is the mass of body 2 will be reduced to only a smidgeon of what it was. We will reduce it to less than a billionth of a billionth the mass the moon had. According to Stripe, eliminating most of this mass will show the orbit is changed. In the interactive tool the “body 2” mass field will only display 5 digits, but in fact the value entered there can use many more digits. We will use a small “apple”, say 0.1 kg. When this value is scaled to the same ratio as the earth, in the interactive tool the apple mass will be 0.0000000000000000000000002 (24 zeroes after the decimal, then the 2). (Even if I were off a few zeroes, we have still reduced the “moon” mass by multiples of millions of times.)
Now Stripe, run the simulation with the “apple moon” in place. Best if you do another screen capture, so you can compare it with the one showing the orbit of the regular moon. Overlay the two orbits, and tell us how much they differ.
There are some other ramifications of that tool, but let’ start with the above.
And finally, I must apologize to Stripe. My mother always reprimanded me when I played with my food. I shouldn’t play with you, Stripe. Sorry.
