Question

What is the average velocity of the planet?

Answer 1

Hint: Orbital velocity is the velocity with which a body revolves around another body. So we can say that it is the velocity with which any planet orbits another planet or stars. It is widely used in astronomy and astrophysics in which they calculate this velocity to launch satellites into orbit and make sure they stay on it. Different planets have different average velocities or orbital velocities.

Complete step by step answer:
Orbital velocity is calculated using the below-given formula,
\[{V_{orbit}} = \sqrt {\dfrac{{GM}}{R}} \]
Here \[{V_{orbit}}\]is the orbital velocity
          \[G\]is the gravitational constant
          \[M\]is said to be the mass of the body at the centre.
          \[R\]is the radius of the orbit.
As we said, different planets have different average velocities. The list of the average or orbital velocities of each planet is given below.
Mercury – \[47.87{\text{ }}km/s\]
Venus – \[35.02{\text{ }}km/s\]
Earth – \[29.78{\text{ }}km/s\]
Mars – \[24.077{\text{ }}km/s\]
Jupiter – \[13.07{\text{ }}km/s\]
Saturn – \[9.69{\text{ }}km/s\]
Uranus – \[6.81{\text{ }}km/s\]
Neptune – \[\;5.43{\text{ }}km/s\]

Additional Information:
Space missions and satellite missions use a very important value which is a combination of orbital velocity and escape velocity. It can be seen from the above formula that orbital velocity is directly proportional to the mass of the body in motion and inversely proportional to the radius of the orbit in which the same body is rotating.

Note:We have seen that both orbital and escape velocity plays an important role in launching satellites and anything related to space. So it is very important to know the difference between these two. We need to achieve a certain level of velocity for an object to fit in an orbit around any celestial object like Earth. And also we need to achieve even more velocity in order to escape such an orbit. The speed required to fit into an orbit is called orbital velocity and the speed required to break free from such an orbit is called escape velocity.