What fuels a comet traveling thru the universe?

Question

I was watching a show about NASA landing a probe on a moving comet but i couldn't understand what propels the comet to travel to speeds up to a 100x faster than a bullet (or so they say on the documentary).

Answer 1

As they said, they use gravity to "slingshot" around the greatest gravity well there is nearby, the sun. The Voyager probe had to slingshot around the sun to be able to get speeds great enough to leave the Solar System. Also, by slinging around the sun, we have been able to reach Jupiter and Mars, and further on out. So, humans have taken lessons from comets on this matter!

Answer 2

Comets orbit the sun just as planets do, except their orbits are more elliptical than circular. Orbiting is another name for falling: planets and comets are constantly falling towards the sun but they don't crash into it because they also have a forward motion, which makes them fall 'around' the sun.

This is why satellites don't fall to earth right away, because they're given an initial push in a horizontal direction. Once that push is given, though, the satellite coasts in free fall and doesn't need any fuel to keep going (unless it's in a low orbit and is slowed down by the upper atmosphere).

When comets get closer to the sun they move faster because the sun's gravity is stronger. It does seem like free energy but it's not - it would require energy to *stop* an orbiting body.

Answer 3

There is no fuel as such. A comet, as with all other objects in space, are acted upon by gravity from surrounding objects, even in deep space. A comet is simply what we call objects which come from "out there" somewhere and have a highly elliptical orbit around the sun, or are captured from somewhere and miss the sun and a slingshot effect changes their course and the leave the solar system. As with planets, velocity is a relative thing. Think about the Earth, 93 million miles from the sun, traveling around the sun in 365 days. Pi times 186 million gives us a rough estimate of the size of our orbit in miles, divided by 365, tells how many miles we travel in a day, divided by 24 tells how many miles we moved in orbit in an hour which is roughly 66000 miles. The Earth is roughly 28000 miles around the equator, which means the speed of rotation is about 1100 miles per hour. Like I said, speed is a relative thing.

Answer 4

A comet ios just a dirty snowball a fronzen ball of ice a few miles wide covered by a layer of black dust. When a comet sweeps in toward the sun it begins to change. The pressure of the sunlight and streams of particles from the sun sweep dust off the comets sureface and evaporate some of the ice.

Answer 5

It doesn't need fuel, it has inertia. That's the quality described by Newton's First Law of Motion ("If a body is at rest or moving at constant speed in a straight line, it will continue to do so unless it is acted upon by a force"). Don't believe sci-fi movies which show ships only moving when the engines are on! Things in space will keep going the way they're going until something changes that - on Earth (or in any atmosphere), friction with air (or the ground) achieves it.

Answer 6

gravity and inertia.

Do you know that our ball of dirt and water goes about 26,000 mph around the Sun? And that the entire solar system is moving through the galaxy even faster?

How come you don't feel a thing?

comets are just bugs in the windshield!

Answer 7

Gravity slingshots comets along their elliptical orbits around whichever star system they happen to be trapped in.

Answer 8

according to einsteins theary something will move forever until it is acted upon by some force. So the gravitational pull makes it orbit and it stays going on forever in that orbit unless some other metior hits it.

Answer 9

well its probably just floating in space at first the gravitational pull of other planets pull it toward the planet causing it ti go at high speeds.

Answer 10

MOMENTUM.

GRAVITATIONAL FORCES FROM MAJOR HEAVENLY BODIES.