What Is Escape Velocity?
Practically all of us must have heard about it. Especially those of us with interests in the field of physics and astronomy. In physics, escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape from the gravitational influence of a more massive and equally massive body.
Our planet, Earth, has an escape velocity of about 11.186kms-¹ at its surface. But in cases of black holes, a speed faster than the speed of light needs to be attained.
Escape velocity can be easily calculated with the formula :
Where G is the universal gravitational constant (G ≈ 6.67×10−11 m3·kg−1·s−2), M the mass of the body to be escaped from and r the distance from the center of mass of the body to the object.
But does this mean travelling at a slower speed will keep you glued to this blue planet? No, it won't.
Most space shuttles need to travel at the escape velocity so that they can be able to reach and maintain orbit without the addition of any external force.
But in the case of slower objects, they can always enter space even with a speed of 1kms-¹ but will need the same resources and an external force to help reach and maintain orbit. In a case whereby these factors aren't considered, such object will just get out into space, not reach orbit, and then plummet back into Earth's atmosphere, due to its gravitational pull on such object.
Stay tuned for more...
Our planet, Earth, has an escape velocity of about 11.186kms-¹ at its surface. But in cases of black holes, a speed faster than the speed of light needs to be attained.
Escape velocity can be easily calculated with the formula :
Photo Credit: Hyperphysics
Where G is the universal gravitational constant (G ≈ 6.67×10−11 m3·kg−1·s−2), M the mass of the body to be escaped from and r the distance from the center of mass of the body to the object.
But does this mean travelling at a slower speed will keep you glued to this blue planet? No, it won't.
Most space shuttles need to travel at the escape velocity so that they can be able to reach and maintain orbit without the addition of any external force.
But in the case of slower objects, they can always enter space even with a speed of 1kms-¹ but will need the same resources and an external force to help reach and maintain orbit. In a case whereby these factors aren't considered, such object will just get out into space, not reach orbit, and then plummet back into Earth's atmosphere, due to its gravitational pull on such object.
Stay tuned for more...
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