General Question Calculating geostationary orbits

[JonnyBGoode]

How does one find the altitude of a geostationary orbit? Or in my case, an arestationary orbit? I wanted to place my Babylon 5 station in a stationary orbit over Mars, so I googled it online and found someone say 17,100 km was the right altitude. But that doesn't work - although it must be fairly close as my orbit is quite slow. Does anyone know what the actual altitude should be - and how to calculate such an orbit?

 

[Pyromaniac605]

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit[/ame] Hope you're good at maths.

Darren

 

[tblaxland]

http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=18542

 

[Grover]

i just worked out a way to calculate it for any body, with known mass and rotational speed:

where r= orbital RADIUS
G=Gravitational constant= ALWAYS ~6.67x10^-11
M=Mass of body
W=angular velocity of body (2pi divided by timer period of rotation in seconds, for earth is equal to 7.27x10^-5 Rad/s
so using this formula, taking earths mass simply as 5.98x1024 KG, geostationary orbit radius of earth is
~72,259,017 meters or 72.26M (as shown on orbiter HUD)
this gives an altitude of ~35.889M, about a tenth of the way to the moon. seems reasonable, so i must have done something right.

all figures i used are accurate to 3 SF, you may find more accurate ones out there, but you wont be more than a few Km out i dont think

note, i worked out the formula myself, then found it as an image on wikipedia, oops :S

hope it helps!

 

[Wishbone]

Shameless plug - the very first page of Precession MFD allows you to finetune the orbit, I may add the autocued display of the stationary orbit's altitude in one of the builds.

 

[SpecialKaye87]

I had to learn this in University Physics II last semester before graduating....ugh.....some one just come up with an online calculator so no one has to go through the arithmetic again. I HATE IT!!!!

 

[boogabooga]

Dear American Orbitnauts,

Please take the United States flag off of your profile when you complain about having to do middle school arithmetic in college. It makes us all look bad.

Thanks,
boogabooga