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Chinese astronauts may build a base inside a lunar lava tube

Caves were some of humanity's first shelters. Who knows what our distant ancestors were thinking as they sought refuge there, huddling and cooking meat over a fire, maybe drawing animals on the walls. Caves protected our ...

Solar sails could reach Mars in just 26 days

A recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica and currently available on the arXiv preprint server explores the potential for using aerographite solar sails for traveling to Mars and interstellar space, which could dramatically ...

Juice: Why's it taking so long?

At their closest point in orbit, Earth and Jupiter are separated by almost 600 million kilometers. At the time of writing, five months after launch, Juice has already traveled 370 million kilometers, yet in time it's only ...

SpaceX test fires a Raptor engine, simulating a lunar landing

When NASA astronauts return to the surface of the moon in the Artemis III mission, the plan is to use a modified SpaceX Starship as their lunar lander. NASA announced last week that SpaceX has now demonstrated an important ...

NOAA's GOES-U completes environmental testing

GOES-U, the fourth and final satellite in NOAA's GOES-R Series of advanced geostationary satellites, recently completed rigorous testing to ensure it can withstand the harsh conditions of launch and orbiting in space 22,236 ...

Astronomers investigate intermediate polar TX Columbae

Using various spacecraft, astronomers from India and Chile have performed X-ray observations of a peculiar intermediate polar known as TX Columbae. Results of the observational campaign, published September 7 on the pre-print ...

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Orbit

In physics, an orbit is the gravitationally curved path of one object around a point or another body, for example the gravitational orbit of a planet around a star.

Historically, the apparent motion of the planets were first understood in terms of epicycles, which are the sums of numerous circular motions. This predicted the path of the planets quite well, until Johannes Kepler was able to show that the motion of the planets were in fact elliptical motions.[citation needed] Isaac Newton was able to prove that this was equivalent to an inverse square, instantaneously propagating force he called gravitation.[citation needed] Albert Einstein later was able to show that gravity is due to curvature of space-time, and that orbits lie upon geodesics. This is the current understanding.

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