i’m a sucker For interesting online games with no score or goal.In this case, it’s the cartoon space simulator that promotes the book what if? 2 by Randall Munro, author of xkcd Manga.
Click here to play. (Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting.)
The game works like this: You start by launching a rocket onto a very small planet.You can click on the rocket to start it, use the keyboard arrows to turn on the thrusters, rotate the spaceship, find other planets and some fun stuff mostly inside what if joke. that’s it. That’s the game. It’s silly and fun, and I love it.
But it turns out that even a simple game can explore some key concepts in physics.
Actual trajectory
One of the features found in the first planet is a recreation of Newton’s cannonball, or Isaac Newton’s thought experiment on the relationship between fast-moving projectiles and orbital motion. Newton said that if a very high velocity cannonball could be fired horizontally from a very high mountain, the curve of its trajectory could match the curvature of the earth. This causes the shell to fall, but not to the ground. Only the ISS wasn’t shot down from a tall mountain (which is basically what happens with an orbiting object like the International Space Station). )
I saw Newton’s cannonballs and thought I could put my own spacecraft into orbit around this little planet. I tried it quickly with the arrow keys with little success. Every time I put it on a stable orbit it didn’t last.So the physical interaction that controls the trajectory is what if The world is like the real universe.
The first physical concept applied to orbital motion is, of course, gravity. There is a gravitational interaction between any two objects with mass. For example, there is a gravitational pull between the earth and a pencil in your hand. Both have mass. If you let go of the pencil, it will fall.
If you are standing on the surface of the earth, the gravitational force acting on your pencil appears constant. However, if you move that pencil far enough away from the Earth (such as the 400-kilometer distance the ISS orbits), you’ll find that the gravitational interaction diminishes. autumn.
We can model gravity between two objects using the following equation:
Illustrated by Rhett Allan
