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Introduction

In this chapter we will first introduce some general concepts about orbits, then describe the shuttle's orbit and how to use drawings of the shuttle's ground tracks during the KidSat flight. Students at the SMOC's will be using ground track maps before and during the mission to determine what parts of the world the shuttle will pass over during STS-81, and therefore which areas can be photographed.

This is a long chapter. The last part of it is critical to participation in KidSat, so don't get too bogged down in the first half. The first half contains some background on gravity and why an object stays in orbit; this is not essential to KidSat, but it is interesting (to us, anyway). The second half is quite important; your students will have to be able to read and interpret a shuttle ground track (Chapter 7 will describe the tools we will provide to assist them).

Background

The space shuttle stays in orbit around the Earth because of the speed it is given after launch and the Earth's gravity. As the shuttle repeatedly orbits the Earth following the same circular path, the Earth rotates beneath it. The trace the shuttle's orbit makes on the surface of the rotating Earth below is called the shuttle's ground track. Ground track maps are extremely useful since they reveal the locations on the Earth that the shuttle directly flies over during its orbit.

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