Orbital Speed and Period of a Satellite

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
Kepler's third law relates the period and the radius of objects in orbit around a star or planet. In conjunction with Newton's law of universal gravitation, giving the attractive force between two masses, we can find the speed and period of an artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth. Consideration is limited to circular orbits.
Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
The speed of a satellite is given by
and the period is
,
where is the distance from the center of the Earth (Earth's radius + altitude
),
is the gravitational constant, and
is the mass of the Earth.
Permanent Citation