Johannes Kepler Research Paper

Kepler’s Laws, Kepler is credited with 3 laws regarding the movement of celestial bodies orbiting other celestial bodies. Johannes Kepler, working with data painstakingly collected by Tycho Brahe without the aid of a telescope, developed three laws which described the motion of the planets across the sky. Kepler's 1st Law: The Law of Orbits, Kepler's 2nd Law: The Law of Areas, and Kepler’s 3rd Law: The Law of Periods. Kepler's laws were derived for orbits around the sun, but they apply to satellite orbits as well. In retrospect, the reason that the orbit of Mars was particularly difficult was that Copernicus had correctly placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System, but had erred in assuming the orbits of the planets to be circles. Thus, in the Copernican theory epicycles were still required to explain the details of planetary motion.
It fell to Kepler to provide the final piece of the puzzle: after a long struggle, in which he tried mightily to avoid his eventual conclusion, Kepler was forced finally to the realization that the orbits of the planets were not the circles demanded by Aristotle and assumed implicitly by Copernicus, but were instead the "flattened circles" …show more content…
For simplicity, we'll consider the motion of the planets in our solar system around the Sun, with gravity as the central force. Among other things, Kepler's laws allow one to predict the position and velocity of the planets at any given time, the time for a satellite to collapse into the surface of a planet, and the period of a planet's orbit as a function of its orbits' geometry. Though the laws were originally obtained by Kepler after careful analysis of empirical data, the complete understanding was missing until Newton derived each law as pieces of his orbital mechanics. In his footsteps we will obtain each law in turn, as we consider the orbit of a planet in the gravity of a massive