Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter for reconnaissance, and for a trajectory boost to Saturn. Generally it has been used in solar orbit, to increase a spacecraft’s velocity and propel it outward in the solar system, much farther away from the sun than its launch vehicle would have been capable of doing, as in the journey of NASA’s Voyager 2. The “gravity assist” flyby technique can add or subtract momentum to increase or decrease the energy of a spacecraft’s orbit.

Knowing the pull of each of the planets can help propel space flight to the furthest extents of the solar system. Exploring the Outer Reaches: Gravity Assistance Similarly, Mars is almost double the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same which demonstrates that Mercury is much denser than Mars. This is because the relatively low average density of Uranus puts the actual surface of the planet far away from the majority of the planet’s mass in the core. O’Donoghue, large planets have gravity comparable to smaller ones at the surface-for example, Uranus attracts the ball down slower than on Earth. It is a planet’s size, mass, and density that determines how strong its gravitational pull is, or, how quick or slow you will approach the surface.Īccording to Dr. Would you float like a feather or sink like a stone? Now, if you were hypothetically landing your spacecraft on a strange planet, you would want to know your rate of descent. Sink like a Stone or Float like a Feather

James O’Donoghue, a Planetary Astronomer at JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) created an animation that simplifies this concept by animating the time it takes a ball to drop from 1,000 meters to the surface of each planet and the Earth’s moon, assuming no air resistance, to better visualize the gravitational pull of the planets.

However, each planet, moon and asteroid have their own gravitational pull defined by their density, size, mass, and proximity to other celestial bodies.ĭr. The gravity of the sun keeps all the planets in orbit in our solar system. Every object out there exerts a gravitational influence on every other object, but to what degree? Gravity is one of the basic forces in the universe. Visualizing the Gravitational Pull of the Planets

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