In reply to OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson's message of Wed, 5 Jun 2013 20:57:45 -0500: Hi Steven, [snip] >Special case 2: This includes the unique circumstance where there exists >zero angular momentum, (where the orbital eccentricity is "1"). What happens >in this case is that the satellite drops directly towards the central mass >and makes "virtual" contact with the center in 1/2 of the orbital period. If >the satellite were to magically "bounce" back at 100%, it would return to >the exact same original position in another 1/2 of an orbital period.
I had been wondering about this on and off for years, but never got around to working it out. Thanks! :) (I kind of suspected as much,because a sine wave is the axial shadow of a circular orbit, and a simple oscillator is described by a sine wave - however, this assumes a constant "k", which is not true of gravitational or electric fields, where it depends on the radius, leading to a quadratic rather than a linear function. Hope I got that right ;) [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
