What Is an Orbit?

The International Space Station orbits Earth once every 90 minutes.

Credits: NASA

The point at which a planet is closest to the sun is called perihelion. The farthest point is called aphelion.
Credits: NOAA

This article is part of the NASA Knows! (Grades K-4) series.

An orbit is a path. It's the way something goes around an object in space. The moon
goes in orbit around Earth. You're in orbit right now! That's because Earth is
following an orbit all the way around the sun. The International Space Station orbits
Earth. An object in orbit is called a satellite. A satellite can be natural, like the moon.
It can be human-made, like the space station. Earth is a natural satellite of the sun.
Planets, comets, asteroids and other objects orbit the sun. Many planets also have
moons. These moons go in orbits around their planets.

What Shape Is an Orbit?

An orbit is a curved path, like a circle or an oval. (The technical word is "ellipse.") A
comet's orbit is very long and thin. Sometimes the comet is close to the sun and
moves quickly. Most of the time it is far from the sun and moves slowly. The moon's
orbit is almost circular.

How Do Objects Stay in Orbit?

A moving object will continue moving unless something pushes or pulls on it. This
statement is called Newton's first law of motion. Without gravity, a satellite would fly
off into space. With gravity, a satellite is constantly pulled back toward Earth. This
tug-of-war keeps the satellite in orbit.

Height is how far up something is. Objects at different heights move at different
speeds in orbit. The space station is about 200 miles above Earth. At that height, the
station must move about 17,500 miles per hour. It takes the space station about 90
minutes to go around Earth. The moon is much higher, about 250,000 miles from
Earth. It takes the moon about 28 days to orbit Earth, going about 2,200 miles per
hour. Earth takes a year to orbit the sun. Pluto takes about 248 Earth years.

What we have just described in the previous section is how a satellite orbits the
Earth - it is just like the baseball that goes all the way around the Earth. Let's look
at that in more detail.

Low Earth Orbits

Most satellites, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, and the Hubble
Space Telescope are all in Low Earth Orbit (commonly called "LEO"). This orbit
is almost identical to our previous baseball orbiting example, except that it is high
enough to miss all the mountains and also high enough that atmospheric drag won't
bring it right back home again.
Advantages and Disadvantages of LEO

Low Earth Orbit is used for things that we want to visit often with the Space
Shuttle, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. This
is convenient for installing new instruments, fixing things that are broken, and
inspecting damage. It is also about the only way we can have people go up, do
experiments, and return in a relatively short time.

There are two disadvantages to having things so close, however. The first is that
there is still some atmospheric drag. Even though the amount of atmosphere is far
too little to breath, there is enough to place a small amount of drag on the satellite
or other object. As a result, over time these objects slow down and their orbits
slowly decay. Simply put, the satellite or spacecraft slows down and this allows the
influence of gravity to pull the object towards the Earth.

The second disadvantage has to do with how quickly a satellite in LEO goes
around the Earth. As you can imagine, a satellite traveling 18,000 miles per hour or
faster does not spend very long over any one part of the Earth at a given time. So
what happens if we want a satellite to spend all of its time over just one part of the
Earth? For instance, a weather satellite wouldn't be very effective for us in North
America if it didn't have a long dwell time over us. (Dwell time = the time a
satellite sits over one part of the globe.) Also, a communications satellite wouldn't
work very well for us in North American if it spent most of its time over Africa or
Asia.

There are two ways to accomplish this. One solution is to put a satellite in a highly
elliptical orbit and the other is to place the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit.
Highly Elliptical Orbits

Remember Kepler's second law: an object in orbit about Earth moves much faster
when it is close to Earth than when it is farther away. Perigee is the closest point
and apogee is the farthest (for Earth - for the Sun we say aphelion and perihelion).
If the orbit is very elliptical, the satellite will spend most of its time near apogee
(the furthest point in its orbit) where it moves very slowly. Thus it can be above
home base most of the time, taking a break once each orbit to speed around the
other side.

With the highly elliptical orbit described above, the satellite has long dwell time
over one area, but at certain times when the satellite is on the high speed portion of
the orbit, there is no coverage over the desired area. To solve this problem we
could have two satellites on similar orbits, but timed to be on opposite sides of the
orbit at any given time. In this way, there will always be one satellite over the
desired coverage area at all times.

If we want continuous coverage over the entire planet at all times, such as the
Department of Defense's Global Positioning System (GPS), then we must have a
constellation of satellites with orbits that are both different in location and time.
In this way, there is a satellite over every part of the Earth at any given time. In the
case of the GPS system, there are three or more satellites covering any location on
the planet.

Geosynchronous Orbits

Another solution to the dwell time problem is to have a satellite always sitting over
the same location on the planet. The way we do this is to have the orbital period of
the satellite exactly the same as the rotation period of the Earth, which is one day.
This is called a geosynchronous orbit, or GEO for short.

In this case, the satellite cannot be too close to the Earth because we already
figured out that it would not be going fast enough to counteract the pull of gravity.
If you recall, the space shuttle, in order to stay aloft, must circle the planet every 90
minutes.
 We
can use Kepler's third law to figure out how far out a satellite must be to spend all
its time over one part of Earth. The answer is that a satellite has to be placed
approximately 22,000 miles (36,000 km) away from the surface of the Earth in
order to remain in a GEO orbit. That is a lot farther than a low Earth orbit, or a
relatively close highly eccentric GPS-like orbit, so it costs more to get it there.
However, then you only need one satellite to do the job and it is on the job 24
hours per day.

By positioning a satellite so that it has infinite dwell time over one spot on the
Earth, we can constantly monitor the weather in one location, provide reliable
telecommunications service, and even beam television signals directly to your
house. If you have satellite TV at home, notice that the small dish antenna outside
is pointing at the same location in the sky at all times. There is a geosynchronous
satellite sitting 22,000 miles away in that direction sending the signal to your
house! The down side of a geosynchronous orbit is that it is more expensive to put
something that high up and not possible to repair it from the shuttle. When a
satellite is in LEO, the shuttle can repair it if needed, as we have done with the
Hubble Space Telescope several times. So you only put something in GEO if you
really need to have it in the same location in the sky at all times.
If it is hard to appreciate the value of these satellites, consider the following true
story: One of the people responsible for this web site was on a small freighter
(ship) on its way from Sweden to the US in November of 1959. The ship had just
reached a particularly nasty part of the North Sea (not too far from the rocky coast
of Scotland) when it was caught in a storm that had not been predicted or seen. For
several days, the ship tossed back and forth on waves as big as it was - or bigger -
tipping more than 30 degrees each way. (If you have seen "The Perfect Storm"
then you have some idea of what that was like.) This ship made it to port some
days later, but quite a few did not, in that storm. A couple of year later, the first
weather satellites were launched, and no ship has been caught by a surprise storm
since then!