Tag: gravity well

Climbing Out Of A Well

On By rolcottIn Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al can’t contain himself. “Wait, it’s gravity!”

Vinnie and I are puzzled. “Come again?”

“Sy, you were going on about how much speed a rocket has to shed on the way to some special orbit around Mars, like that’s a big challenge. But it’s not. The rocket’s fighting the Sun’s gravity all the way. That’s where the speed goes. The Earth’s gravity, too, a little bit early on, but mostly the Sun’s, right?”

“Good point, Al. Sun gravity’s what bends the rocket onto a curve instead of a straight line. Okay, Sy, you got a magic equation that accounts for the shed speed? Something’s gotta, ’cause we got satellites going around Mars.”

“Good point, Vinnie, and you’re right, there is an equation. It’s not magic, you’ve already seen it and it ties kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy.”

“Wait, if I remember right, kinetic energy goes like mass times velocity squared. How can you calculate that without knowing how big the rocket is?”

“Good question. We get around that by thinking things through for a unit mass, one kilogram in SI units. We can multiply by the rocket’s mass when we’re done, if we need to. The kinetic energy per unit mass, we call that specific kinetic energy, is just ½v². Look familiar?”

“That’s one side of your v²=2GM/R equation except you’ve got the 2 on the other side.”

“Good eye, Al. The right-hand side, except for the 2, is specific gravitational potential energy, again for unit mass. But we can’t use the equation unless we know the kinetic energy and gravitational potential are indeed equal. That’s true if you’re in orbit but we’re talking about traveling between orbits where you’re trading kinetic for potential or vice versa. One gains what the other loses so Al’s right on the money. Traveling out of a gravity well is all about losing speed.”

Al’s catching up. “So how fast you’re going determines how high you are, and how high you are says how fast you have to be going.”

Vinnie frowns a little. “I’m thinking back to in‑flight refueling ops where I’m coming up to the tanker from below and behind while the boom operator directs me in. That doesn’t sound like it’d work for joining up to a satellite.”

“Absolutely. If you’re above and behind you could speed up to meet the beast falling, or from below and ahead you could slow down to rise. Away from that diagonal you’d be out of luck. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah. Which reminds me, now we’re talking about this ‘deeper means faster‘ stuff. How does the deep‑dive maneuver work? You know, where they dive a spacecraft close to a planet or something and it shoots off with more speed than it started with. Seems to me whatever speed it gains it oughta give up on the way out of the well.”

“It’s a surprise play, alright, but it’s actually two different tricks. The slingshot trick is to dive close enough to capture a bit of the planet’s orbital momentum before you fly back out of the well. If you’re going in the planet’s direction you come out going faster than you went in.”

“Or you could dive in the other direction to slow yourself down, right?”

“Of course, Al. NASA used both options for the Voyager and Messenger missions. Vinnie, I know what you’re thinking and yes, theoretically stealing a planet’s orbital momentum could affect its motion but really, planets are huge and spacecraft are teeny. DART hit the Dimorphos moonlet head-on and slowed it down by 5%, but you’d need 66 trillion copies of Dimorphos to equal the mass of dinky little Mercury.”

“What’s the other trick?”

“Dive in like with the slingshot, but fire your rocket engine when you’re going fastest, just as the craft approaches its closest point to the planet. Another German rocketeer, Hermann Oberth, was the first to apply serious math to space navigation. This trick’s sometimes called the Oberth effect, though he didn’t call it that. He showed that rocket exhaust gets more effective the faster you’re going. The planet’s gravity helps you along on that, for free.”

“Free help is good.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Sail On, Silver Bird

On By rolcottIn Physics: Light and Relativity, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Big excitement in Al’s coffee shop. “What’s the fuss, Al?”

“Lightsail 2, Sy. The Planetary Society’s Sun-powered spacecraft. Ten years of work and some luck and it’s up there, way above Hubble and the ISS, boosting itself higher every day and using no fuel to do it. Is that cool or what?”

“Sun-powered? Like with a huge set of solar panels and an electric engine?”

“No, that’s the thing. It’s got a couple of little panels to power its electronics and all, but propulsion is all direct from the Sun and that doesn’t stop. Steady as she goes, Skipper, Earth to Mars in weeks, not months. Woo-hoo!”

Image by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society

Never the rah-rah type, Big Vinnie throws shade from his usual table by the door. “It didn’t get there by itself, Al. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket did the hard work, getting Lightsail 2 and about 20 other thingies up to orbit. Takes a lot of thrust to get out of Earth’s gravity well. Chemical rockets can do that, puny little ion drives and lightsails can’t.”

“Yeah, Vinnie, but those ‘puny’ guys could lead us to a totally different travel strategy.” A voice from the crowd, astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes. “Your big brawny rocket has to burn a lot of delta-v just to boost its own fuel. That’s a problem.”

Al looks puzzled. “Delta-v?”

“It’s how you figure rocket propellant, Al. With a car you think about miles per gallon because if you take your foot off the gas you eventually stop. In space you just keep going with whatever momentum you’ve got. What’s important is how much you can change momentum — speed up, slow down, change direction — and that depends on the propellant you’re using and the engine you’re putting it through. All you’ve got is what’s in the tanks.”

Al still looks puzzled. I fill in the connection. “Delta means difference, Al, and v is velocity which covers both speed and direction so delta-v means — “

“Got it, Sy. So Vinnie likes big hardware but bigger makes for harder to get off the ground and Newt’s suggesting there’s a limit somewhere.”

“Yup, it’s gotten to the point that the SpaceX people chase an extra few percent performance by chilling their propellants so they can cram more into the size tanks they use. I don’t know what the limit is but we may be getting close.”

Newt’s back in. “Which is where strategy comes in, Vinnie. Up to now we’re mostly using a ballistic strategy to get to off-Earth destinations, treating the vehicle like a projectile that gets all its momentum at the beginning of the trip. But there’s really three phases to the trip, right? You climb out of a gravity well, you travel to your target, and maybe you make a controlled landing you hope. With the ballistic strategy you burn your fuel in phase one while you’re getting yourself into a transfer orbit. Then you coast on momentum through phase two.”

“You got a better strategy?”

“In some ways, yeah. How about applying continuous acceleration throughout phase two instead of just coasting? The Dawn spacecraft, for example, was rocket-launched out of Earth’s gravity well but used a xenon-ion engine in continuous-burn mode to get to Mars and then on to Vesta and Ceres. Worked just fine.”

“But they’re such low-thrust –“

“Hey, Vinnie, taking a long time to build up speed’s no problem when you’re on a long trip anyway. Dawn‘s motor averaged 1.8 kilometer per second of delta-v — that works out to … about 4,000 miles per hour of increased speed for every hour you keep the motor running. Adds up.”

“OK, I’ll give you the ion motor’s more efficient than a chemical system, but still, you need that xenon reaction mass to get your delta-v. You still gotta boost it up out of the well. All you’re doing with that strategy is extend the limit.”

Al dives back in. “That’s the beauty of Lightsail, guys. No delta-v at all. Just put it up there and light-pressure from the Sun provides the energy. Look, I got this slick video that shows how it works.”

Video courtesy of The Planetary Society.

~~ Rich Olcott

What’s that funnel about, really?

On By rolcottIn Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

If you’ve ever watched or read a space opera (oh yes, you have), you know about the gravity well that a spacecraft has to climb out of when leaving a planet.  Every time I see the Museum’s gravity well model (photo below), I’m reminded of all the answers the guy gave to, “Johnny, what can you make of this?”

The model’s a great visitor-attracter with those “planets” whizzing around the “Sun,” but this one exhibit really represents several distinct concepts.   For some of them it’s not quite the right shape.DMNS gravity well

The simplest concept is geometrical.  “Down” is the direction you move when gravity’s pulling on you.

HS cone
Gravitational potential energy change
for small height differences

A gravity well model for that concept would be just a straight line between you and the neighborhood’s most intense gravity source.

You learned the second concept in high school physics class.  Any object has gravitational potential energy that measures the amount of energy it would give up on falling.  Your teacher probably showed you the equation GPE = m·g·h, where m is the mass of the object, h is its height above ground level, and g is a constant you may have determined in a lab experiment.

If the width of the gravity well model at a given height represents GPE at that level, the model is a simple straight-sided cone.

Newton energy cone
Gravitational potential energy change
for large height differences
The h indicates
an approximately linear range
where the HS equation could apply.

But of course it’s not that simple.  Newton’s Law of Gravity says that the potential energy at any height r away from the planet’s center is proportional to 1/r.

Hmm… that looks different from the “proportional to h” equation.  Which is right?

Both equations are valid, but over different distance scales.  The HS teachers didn’t quite lie to you, but they didn’t give you the complete picture either.  Your classroom was about 4000 miles (21,120,000 feet) from Earth’s center, whereas the usual experiments involve height differences of at most a dozen feet.  Even the 20-foot drop from a second-story window is less than a millionth of the way down to Earth’s center.

Check my numbers:

Height h 1/(r+h)
× 108		 Difference in 1/(r+h)
× 1014
0 4.734,848,484 0
20 4.734,844,001 4.48
40 4.734,839,517 8.97
60 4.734,835,033 13.45
80 4.734,830,549 17.93
100 4.734,826,066 22.42

rh lineSure enough, that’s a straight line (see the chart).  Reminds me of how Newton’s Law of Gravity is valid except at very short distances.  The HS Law of Gravity works fine for small spans but when the distances get big we have to use Newton’s equation.

We’re not done yet. That curvy funnel-shaped gravity well model could represent the force of gravity rather than its potential energy.  Newton told us that the force goes as 1/r2 so it decreases much more rapidly than the potential energy does as you get further away.  The gravity force well has a correspondingly sharper curve to it than the gravity energy well.

Newton force cone
The force of gravity
or an embedding diagram

The funnel model could also represent the total energy required to get a real spacecraft off the surface and up into space.  Depending on which sci-fi gimmickry is in play, the energy may come from a chemical or ion rocket, an electromagnetic railgun, or even a tractor beam from some mothership way up there.

No matter the technology, the theoretical energy requirement to get to a given height is the same.  In practice, however, each technology is optimal for some situations but forbiddingly inefficient in others.  Thus, each technology’s funnel  has its own shape and that shape will change depending on the setting.

In modern physics, the funnel model could also represent Einstein’s theory of how a mass “bends” the space around it.  (Take a look at this post, which is about how mass curves space by changing the local distance scale.)  Cosmologists describe the resulting “shapes” with embedding diagrams that are essentially 2D pictures of 3D (or 4D) contour plots.  The contours are closest together where space is most compressed, just as lines showing a steep hillside on a landscape contour map are close together.

The ED around a non-spinning object looks just like the force model picture above.  No surprise — gravitational force is how we we perceive spatial curvature.

~~ Rich Olcott

Throwing a Summertime curve

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Mathematics: Dimensions, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

All cats are gray in the dark, and all lines are straight in one-dimensional space.  Sure, you can look at a garden hose and see curves (and kinks, dammit), but a short-sighted snail crawling along on it knows only forward and backward.  Without some 2D notion of sideways, the poor thing has no way to sense or cope with curvature.

Up here in 3D-land we can readily see the hose’s curved path through all three dimensions.  We can also see that the snail’s shell has two distinct curvatures in 3D-space — the tube has an oval cross-section and also spirals perpendicular to that.

But Einstein said that our 3D-space itself can have curvature.  Does mass somehow bend space through some extra dimension?  Can a gravity well be a funnel to … somewhere else?

No and no.  Mathematicians have come up with a dozen technically different kinds of curvature to fit different situations.  Most have to do with extrinsic non-straightness, apparent only from a higher dimension.  That’s us looking at the hose in 3D.

Einstein’s work centered on intrinsic curvature, dependent only upon properties that can be measured within an object’s “natural” set of dimensions.Torus curvature

On a surface, for instance, you could draw a triangle using three straight lines.  If the figure’s interior angles sum up to exactly 180°, you’ve got a flat plane, zero intrinsic curvature.  On a sphere (“straight line” = “arc from a great circle”) or the outside rim of a doughnut, the sum is greater than 180° and the curvature is positive.
Circle curvatures
If there’s zero curvature and positive curvature, there’s gotta be negative curvature, right?  Right — you’ll get less-than-180° triangles on a Pringles chip or on the inside rim of a doughnut.

Some surfaces don’t have intersecting straight lines, but you can still classify their curvature by using a different criterion.  Visualize our snail gliding along the biggest “circle” he/she/it (with snails it’s complicated) can get to while tethered by a thread pinned to a point on the surface. Divide the circle’s circumference by the length of the thread.  If the ratio’s equal to 2π then the snail’s on flat ground.  If the ratio is bigger than 2π,  the critter’s on a saddle surface (negative curvature). If it’s smaller, then he/she/it has found positive curvature.

In a sense, we’re comparing the length of a periphery and a measure of what’s inside it.  That’s the sense in which Einsteinian space is curved — there are regions in which the area inside a circle (or the volume inside a sphere) is greater than or less than what would be expected from the size of its boundary.

Here’s an example.  The upper panel’s dotted grid represents a simple flat space being traversed by a “disk.”  See how the disk’s location has no effect on its size or shape.  As a result, dividing its circumference by its radius always gives you 2π.Curvature 3

In the bottom panel I’ve transformed* the picture to represent space in the neighborhood of a black hole (the gray circle is its Event Horizon) as seen from a distance.  Close-up, every row of dots would appear straight.  However, from afar the disk’s apparent size and shape depend on where it is relative to the BH.

By the way, the disk is NOT “falling” into the BH.  This is about the shape of space itself — there’s no gravitational attraction or distortion by tidal spaghettification.

Visually, the disk appears to ooze down one of those famous 3D parabolic funnels.  But it doesn’t — all of this activity takes place within the BH’s equatorial plane, a completely 2D place.  The equations generate that visual effect by distorting space and changing the local distance scale near our massive object.  This particular distortion generates positive curvature — at 90% through the video, the disk’s C/r ratio is about 2% less than 2π.

As I tell Museum visitors, “miles are shorter near a black hole.”

~~ Rich Olcott

* – If you’re interested, here are the technical details.  A Schwarzchild BH, distances as multiples of the EH radius.  The disk (diameter 2.0) is depicted at successive time-free points in the BH equatorial plane.  The calculation uses Flamm’s paraboloid to convert each grid point’s local (r,φ) coordinates to (w,φ) to represent the spatial configuration as seen from r>>w.