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In mathematics, the eccentricity of a conic section is a non-negative real number that uniquely characterizes its shape. One can think of the eccentricity as a measure of how much a conic section deviates from being circular. In particular: The eccentricity of a circle is 0. The eccentricity of an ellipse which is not a circle is between 0 and 1.
For example, to view the eccentricity of the planet Mercury (e = 0.2056), one must simply calculate the inverse sine to find the projection angle of 11.86 degrees. Then, tilting any circular object by that angle, the apparent ellipse of that object projected to the viewer's eye will be of the same eccentricity.
The eccentricity e is defined as: = . From Pythagoras's theorem applied to the triangle with r (a distance FP) as hypotenuse: = + () = () + ( + ) = + = () Thus, the radius (distance from the focus to point P) is related to the eccentric anomaly by the formula
is the eccentricity of the central body (e.g., 0.081819 for Earth) ϕ n {\displaystyle \phi _{n}} is the geodetic latitude (the angle between the normal line of horizontal plane and the equatorial plane)
As for instance, if the body passes the periastron at coordinates = (), =, at time =, then to find out the position of the body at any time, you first calculate the mean anomaly from the time and the mean motion by the formula = (), then solve the Kepler equation above to get , then get the coordinates from:
For Kepler orbits the eccentricity vector is a constant of motion. Its main use is in the analysis of almost circular orbits, as perturbing (non-Keplerian) forces on an actual orbit will cause the osculating eccentricity vector to change continuously as opposed to the eccentricity and argument of periapsis parameters for which eccentricity zero ...
All bounded orbits where the gravity of a central body dominates are elliptical in nature. A special case of this is the circular orbit, which is an ellipse of zero eccentricity. The formula for the velocity of a body in a circular orbit at distance r from the center of gravity of mass M can be derived as follows:
Keplerian elements parameters can be encoded as text in a number of formats. The most common of them is the NASA / NORAD "two-line elements" (TLE) format, [4] originally designed for use with 80 column punched cards, but still in use because it is the most common format, and 80-character ASCII records can be handled efficiently by modern databases.