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### Dawn Spacecraft: Why are the orbits so high?

I understand Dawn has a mission to undertake geologic ("Cereologic"?) mapping of Ceres, but its final orbit will be at 22,000 km / 49% disk illumination. Surely, there would be some value for ...
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### General guidelines for modeling a low thrust ion spiral?

I've been told that for low thrust ion spirals, delta V would be the difference between speeds of departure and destination orbits. For example the delta V between a 7.7 km/s LEO and a 3.1 km/s GEO ...
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### Could a cubesat propel itself to Mars?

I wrote the answer below to the question Could a cubesat be propelled to the moon? before realizing that it said Moon and I'd written it for Mars, so I've cloned that question and moved the answer ...
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### How to calculate the flight path angle, γ, from a state vector?

@Julio's excellent answer describes a flight path angle, and explains that it is the angle between the tangential direction (perpendicular to the radial vector to the central body) and the current ...
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### Why would a slow spiral from a C3 of zero take about 2.4 times as much ΔV as an impulsive maneuver?

I just read a fascinating comment that I don't understand. In part it says ...the Oberth effect does not depend on the mass of the object. A slow spiral in to a low orbit from a C3 of zero will ...
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### Ratio of low-thrust slow spiral to Hohmann transfer $\Delta V$?

Going from one circular orbit to another, there are tables out there and equations that give the total $\Delta V$ needed for a two or three impulse maneuver scenario. For a very low thrust propulsion ...
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### Spiraling out from circular orbit to escape via low thrust, what is γ (gamma)?

@MarkAdler's comment led me to ask Why would a slow spiral from a C3 of zero take about 2.4 times as much ΔV as an impulsive maneuver? which resulted in this tidy and efficient @MarkAdler answer which ...
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### Orbital vocabulary confusion! How can the tangential velocity of an elliptical Kepler orbit not be tangent to the orbit?

I'm now officially confused about the usage of "tangential" when breaking down orbital velocity components. It started with edits and comments on this answer to Orbital speed is (vector) sum of ...