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Ballistic capture orbit: a lower-energy orbit than a Hohmann transfer orbit, a spacecraft moving at a lower orbital velocity than the target celestial body is inserted into a similar orbit, allowing the planet or moon to move toward it and gravitationally snag it into orbit around the celestial body.
Ignoring the influence of other Solar System bodies, Earth's orbit, also called Earth's revolution, is an ellipse with the Earth–Sun barycenter as one focus with a current eccentricity of 0.0167. Since this value is close to zero, the center of the orbit is relatively close to the center of the Sun (relative to the size of the orbit).
The orbit of a planet around the Sun is an ellipse, with the Sun in one of the focal points of that ellipse. [This focal point is actually the barycenter of the Sun-planet system; for simplicity, this explanation assumes the Sun's mass is infinitely larger than that planet's.] The planet's orbit lies in a plane, called the orbital plane. The ...
Euler diagram showing the types of bodies orbiting the Sun. The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun. Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more. The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. 2021 PH27; Mercury
The planet follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, rather than a circular orbit. ... This year, Earth will be furthest from the sun on July 4. That moment, called aphelion, will occur when the ...
Earth's orbit around the Sun is an ellipse. The semi-major axis of this elliptic orbit is defined to be half of the straight line segment that joins the perihelion and aphelion. The centre of the Sun lies on this straight line segment, but not at its midpoint.
The ecliptic is the apparent path of the Sun throughout the course of a year. [5] Because Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun, the apparent position of the Sun takes one year to make a complete circuit of the ecliptic. With slightly more than 365 days in one year, the Sun moves a little less than 1° eastward [6] every day.
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...