Thursday, May 15, 2014

[snwbmyvl] Two gravitational parabolas

An object travels in a parabolic trajectory over a flat surface with gravity pointing uniformly down.

An object travels in a parabolic trajectory approaching a gravitational point mass at a critical velocity, an "orbit" of an ellipse with eccentricity 1.

It is curious that the shape is the same -- parabola -- but the speed along the path is different.

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