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Escape Velocity Calculator
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Everything in space is a delicate balance. A moving object, like a rocket or an asteroid, has inertia and wants to travel in a straight line forever. However, the immense gravitational force of a massive body (like a planet or a star) constantly attracts it, trying to make it fall.
From the interaction between these two forces arise the fundamental concepts of orbital motion.
What is Orbital Velocity?
Orbital velocity (vorb) is the perfect "equilibrium point"—the exact speed at which an object must move laterally so that the curvature of its fall (caused by gravity) perfectly matches the curvature of the planet.
Imagine you're on an incredibly tall tower and you fire a cannonball.
If you fire slowly, it falls to Earth.
If you fire faster, it travels farther before falling.
If you fire at the exact orbital velocity, the cannonball "falls" perpetually, but the Earth curves "away" from it at the same rate. The cannonball never lands: it's now in orbit.
It's in a constant state of free fall, but falling around the planet, not towards it.
What is Escape Velocity?
Now, what happens if you fire that cannonball even faster?
Escape velocity (ve) is the point of no return; it is the minimum speed at which the object's kinetic energy is so great that the pull of gravity, although slowing it down, is never enough to stop it or change its path back.
The object breaks its closed orbit and escapes the planet's gravitational "well," traveling indefinitely into deep space on an open trajectory (parabolic or hyperbolic).
The Absolute Limit: Schwarzschild Radius
Physics takes this concept to its most fascinating extreme. How dense would an object have to be for its escape velocity to equal the speed of light (the theoretical maximum speed in the universe)?
The Schwarzschild radius (Rs) answers this question. It is the radius to which you would have to compress the entire mass of a body for its surface gravity to be so intense that not even light could escape. This is the threshold that defines the event horizon of a black hole.
These three metrics are not just numbers; they are the principles that dictate how satellites orbit our world, how we send probes to other planets, and how we understand the most extreme objects in the cosmos.
The formula for escape velocity is:
