Kepler's laws
Learning objectives
- To illustrate Kepler's laws.
Pedagogical scenario inspired by the 2014 Rosetta Mission downloadable here.
Kepler (1571 - 1630) announced his three famous laws of planetary motion in 1609:
- Each planet or comet moves in an elliptical orbit, with the sun at one focus of the ellipse.
- A line from the sun to a given planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time.
- The periods of the planets are proportional to the 3/2 power of the major axis length of their orbits.
This animation illustrates the first two laws.
Click on [pause] to stop the animation.
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