Engineering Expert Witness Blog

      Last time we began our discussion on velocity by focusing on one of its aspects, distance, and we calculated Earth’s orbital distance around the sun to be 5,816,023,200 miles.   Today we’ll focus on velocity’s other aspect, time.   Together, these aspects will allow us to solve for Earth’s orbital velocity, aka speed.

      When early astronomers monitored Earth’s journeys, they found it took exactly one year for it to complete its orbit around the sun.   They combined this fact with Earth’s orbital travel distance of 5,816,023,200, or 9.36 × 10¹¹ meters — meters being the unit of measurement most often used in scientific computations — and solved for Earth’s orbital velocity as follows,

v = 9.36 × 10¹¹ meters ÷ 1 year = 9.36 × 10¹¹ meters per year

      The scientific notation of 9.36 × 10¹¹ equates to 936,000,000,000 meters, a large and unruly number to work with.   We can simplify things further by breaking this number down into units of meters per second, which will then allow us to arrive at Earth’s velocity in terms of miles per hour, something most Earthlings can relate to.

      One meter per second is equal to 2.237 miles per hour, and there are 31,536,000 seconds in one year, so breaking Earth’s orbital velocity down into meters per second we arrive at,

v = 9.36 × 10¹¹ meters ÷ 31,536,000 seconds = 29,680 meters per second

v = (29,680 meters per second) × (2.237 mph/m/sec) = 66,394 miles per hour

      Yes, it’s true, Earth whips around the sun at warp speed.  Our fastest man made rockets only achieve speeds of about 25,000 miles per hour.   Earth beats them two-to-one!

      Now that we know Earth’s orbital velocity, we have everything we need to calculate the gravitational force exerted on Earth by the sun.   We’ll do that next time.

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