From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 11:12:16 MST
Here's my current thinking:
Earth spins counterclockwise or East (looking down from the N pole). The
geostationary lump orbits in the equatorial plane counterclockwise, matching
exactly. It also might start off (but not necessarily, for angular momentum
reasons Spike announced) with one face tide-locked to the Earth.
Imagine it's a small globe and it starts getting squeezed into an egg/oval
with long axis normal to the surface; this lengthens until the whole lump is
a huge cable with a double bell-curve cross section. I assume it's
progessively forced to precess East until the long axis of the lengthening
egg is tangent to the Earth.
Why? Because the lower tip of the egg is moving at 5500 km/hr but while it
remains lower than the core body it's circling the Earth in an orbit where
it only needs to move at 4000 or 3000 km/hr, so it's kicked upwards in an
easterly direction. Meanwhile, the upper tip is going too slowly, so it
drags behind to the west.
You'll end up with the cable curved around the geostationary orbit, I'd have
thought. But what would I know?
If I knew how to draw dear little applets of rotating things I'd simulate
it, but I don't. If none of the above is true, I assume several factors
really must cancel out.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Feb 12 2003 - 11:15:20 MST