Aerobraking

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Science and technology

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

Aerobraking is a spaceflight maneuver that reduces the high point of an elliptical orbit (apoapsis) by flying the vehicle through the atmosphere at the low point of the orbit (periapsis). The resulting drag slows the spacecraft.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Aerobraking”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.