How fast do you have to be going to exit the earth's Atmosphere?

Answer 1

While the Earth orbits around the Sun at a relative 66,700 miles per hour, the Sun is not a stationary object. It is generally accepted that the Earth, Sun, Milky Way and the Local Cluster all move through the Universe at 373 miles/second (600Km/s.)

A widen perspective could include several other facts as well. The earth's rotational speed, depending on how close to the poles varies from 0 to 1040 miles/hour, which at the high end is about .288 miles/sec.

This combined with the 66,700 mile/hour mentioned above, is about 18.5 miles/second.

It is commonly known that the earth rotates around the sun. But the sun is not standing still, it also rotates on its spiral arm round the galaxy at about 447,000 miles/hour or 124 mile/sec.

Combining this with the 18.5 mi/s =143 miles/second; 514,000 mi/h (827,000 km/h)

Add this to the generally accepted view that the galaxy travels through the universe at about 373 mile/second (600km/sec):

Total earth speed through space is about: 516 miles/second (830 km/s); 1,860,000 miles/hour (2,990,000 km/h)

Answer 2

The earth moves at about 67,000 miles per hour around the sun and rotates over 1000 miles per hour.

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The Earth's orbit isn't quite circular; it's a little bit elliptical, so the speed of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun is not constant. It's a little faster in January, when the Earth is closest to the Sun, and it slows down a bit until July, when it is furthest away. But on average, just a bit under 67,000 miles per hour.

Answer 3

Relative to the Sun, the Earth pokes along at a little under 67,000 miles per hour in its orbit. The Earth's speed changes a little throughout the year, speeding up from July to January, reaching perihelion (closest point to the Sun) about January 4, and then slowing down a little until reaching aphelion about July 2.

Answer 4

The "how long" part depends on the speed of your spacecraft. If you have sufficient fuel, you could take a very slow and gentle approach and spend an hour or so at it.

But since current spacecraft are chemical rockets, and the fuel is used up very quickly, rocket designers try to accelerate as rapidly as the payload/crew and rocket can tolerate. For the Space Shuttle, this means that the shuttle is above 99% of the Earth's atmosphere in about 2 minutes.

Answer 5

There is a lot of confusion about what velocity is needed to leave the Earth. The commonly used "escape velocity" of around 25,000 miles per hour is the velocity of a CANNON that you would need to fire into the air in order to escape from Earth's gravitational well. But that's ridiculous; we don't fire spacecraft from cannons, and if we did, the acceleration shock would kill the crew and destroy the spacecraft.

The truth is much more subtle. All rockets up to now - and for the foreseeable future - are extremely limited in how much fuel they can carry. IN fact, spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or the Saturn V rocket were designed to carry JUST BARELY ENOUGH fuel to do the job. The reason? Fuel is HEAVY! It takes dozens of pounds of fuel to lift ONE additional pound of fuel into orbit.

If a spacecraft had unlimited power and fuel, or perhaps some sort of Star-Trek style "impulse engine" that would move the ship without expending fuel, then a spaceship could take off gently, like a small airplane, and fly up to the "edge of space" at a few miles per hour. But the kind of rockets that we use now, spacecraft burn up almost all of their fuel in a few minutes and achieve fairly high velocities.

Scaled Composites "SpaceShipOne" made it beyond about 99.9% of the Earth's atmosphere - and when it peaked, it was almost standing still.

Answer 6

If you're inside the event horizon of the black hole, then you cannot go fast enough to escape the pull, since the definition of the event horizon is that (imaginary) surface surrounding the singularity at which the escape velocity is exactly equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. It's not possible to go faster than that, so if you're inside the event horizon, you're not getting out.

There are some minor quibbles about this, since particles CAN "leak out" of a black hole via Hawking radiation. This is a weird special case though, and certainly wouldn't affect any macroscopic body, i.e. "you".

However, there's nothing magical about black holes. If you're some considerable distance outside the event horizon, then the escape velocity from that point is the same as it would be for any other object of the same mass. For example, if you were 700,000 km from a black hole with the mass of the Sun, the escape velocity would be about 615 km/s, which is the escape velocity from the surface of the Sun (which has a radius of about 700,000 km).

It's also possibly worth pointing out a mistake some people make: you don't have to move at "escape velocity" to successfully leave a massive body; you can go as slow as you like, as long as your acceleration away from it (due to thrust) is higher than your acceleration towards it (due to gravity). For example, imagine for a moment that there was a ladder reaching to the Moon ... you could, in theory, climb that ladder at a few feet per minute, and you'd still eventually get to the Moon. Escape velocity actually really only applies to the speed at which you'd need to launch a non-powered projectile to get it to escape the body's gravity well.

Answer 7

The Earth's orbital speed varies a little; at perihelion in January (the nearest point to the Sun) the Earth is moving a little faster, and at aphelion (most distant from the Sun) the Earth is moving a little more slowly. But on average, the Earth is moving about 67,000 miles per hour in its orbit.

Answer 8

The speed of the Earth in its elliptical orbit around the Sun varies a little, being faster when Earth is nearest the Sun (called "perihelion" in January) and a little slower when the Earth is farthest away (at "aphelion", in July). But the average is about 67,000 miles per hour. This does not include the proper motion of the entire solar system as the Sun orbits the center of the galaxy, which takes about 220 million years, or the (unknowable) proper motion of the Milky Way as it travels through the universe.

Answer 9

Assuming the Sun to be stationary (which it isn't, but we've got to assume something is stationary or we can't calculate a speed): 66,659 miles per hour - approximately.

Assuming Earth's average distance from the sun is 93,000,000 miles, the equation is

93,000,000 x 2 x Pi* (Distance travelled in miles) 584,335,740 miles

-------------------------- = ----------------------------------- = ----------------------- = 66,659 mph

24 x 365.25 (Time taken in hours) 8,766 hours

*Assuming Pi to be 3.14159

Answer 10

It depends on how fast you go and where you consider the atmosphere to stop (it's not a hard boundary, it just sort of gradually fades away).

In the final space shuttle mission, main engine cutoff occurred about 8.4 minutes after launch, at which point the shuttle was above well over 90% of the atmosphere and into the mesosphere region.