Orbits

Orbits are the stable paths traced by satellites around a world. Though a satellite is always moving, an orbit itself is treated as a stationary, stable pattern of motion.

First appearance and context

Orbits are discussed during a post-meal cleanup when a young fid, Barb, talks about early lessons from Grandsuur Ylma. He notes that any observer can distinguish polar versus equatorial paths by looking at the sky, yet the raw coordinate math he is learning makes such distinctions hard to see.

Description and properties

• Orbits are classified by orientation, such as polar or equatorial, describing whether a satellite passes over the poles or circles around the equator.
• While position (x, y, z) and velocity components can describe a satellite at an instant, those numbers alone don’t reveal the stability or overall shape of the path, nor make it obvious which class of orbit it belongs to.

Methods and terminology

• Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates are used pedagogically to work through the fundamentals, though they can obscure the higher-level picture of the motion.
• Cosmographers instead prefer orbital elements: a set of six numbers that fully characterize how a satellite is moving. From these, one can immediately visualize the orbit and tell whether it is polar, equatorial, or otherwise.
• More general theoretical “spaces,” such as those associated with Saunt Hemn (configuration or Hemn spaces), are introduced to move beyond raw coordinate descriptions when appropriate.

Current status

Orbits are an active topic of instruction for novices; Barb is being taught by Grandsuur Ylma and is being guided toward using orbital elements to make the motion easier to reason about.