3189: Conic Sections
| Conic Sections |
 Title text: They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners. |
Explanation
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This is one of 63 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
A Kepler orbit describes the simplified motion of two celestial objects around each other based only on their gravitational forces, ignoring any other factors such as gravity of other objects, atmospheric drag, and non-spherical bodies. Such an orbit will form a conic section. A conic section is a curve obtained from a cone's surface intersecting a plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is a special case of the ellipse, though it was sometimes considered a fourth type.
In real conic sections, the cone extends to infinity. In the comic, however, the "conic section" representing the satellite's orbit has a base, resulting in sharp corners where the base and the lateral surface meet. As alluded to in the title text, these corners would be extremely uncomfortable for an astronaut in a crewed spacecraft. Such an extreme and sudden change in direction would require a very large, potentially dangerous G-force.
Transcript
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- [A view of the Earth, focused on Asia and the Indian Ocean with East Africa at left and the Western Pacific and Australia at right. A satellite is shown in an unusual orbit around the planet.]
- [Caption below the panel:]
- All Keplerian orbits are conic sections. For example, this one uses the base of the cone.
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Isn't the base of a cone, just a circle? How would this have "corners"? SDSpivey (talk) 01:41, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
- The cone upon which a conic section exists doesn't actually have a base, it's just arbitrarily large (possibly infinitely so) in order for the section to only ever lay along the 'curve' of the cone part.
- But, here, the base is wwhere you give up on plotting how far 'down the cone' you go, of the sufficiently large ellipse (or possibly parabolic/hyperbolic curve), which is indeed round but has an sharp (i.e. acute) angle between its flat (and incidentally circular) plane-section and the 'wrapped' pseudo-euclidean plane of the conic-section it intersects with. 92.23.2.208 01:50, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
Bring a jacket and spoon for orbits that go through the ice cream.Lord Pishky (talk) 01:43, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure this is the shape of the flat bottom of a cake cone. 71.212.56.254 03:02, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
It appears to be a cut-off section of an ellipse, so basically a regular orbit with a sharp line. (Desmos) Tanner07 (talk) 04:29, 3 January 2026 (UTC)
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D5622AQH3CYoPXy1cqg/feedshare-shrink_2048_1536/feedshare-shrink_2048_1536/0/1727242249609?e=1769040000&v=beta&t=UdAX9TH3joo-vpvj4pRWXoCQyF6JVUPVmyONWghcj5E --PRR (talk) 05:06, 3 January 2026 (UTC) Add comment
