Momentum

Momentum may not be the right word.

I was sitting here in silence thinking to myself.

I thought about a network of satellites surrounding the entire earth in a grid pattern.
Far enough away so that earth's gravity was close to nothing.
Far enough away so that humans could not see them with the naked eye.

When I imagined this a began to see the thrusters on the satellites firing at random.
I thought they must be correcting their placement.
Then I thought if an object is in the vacume of space could it ever have zero momentum?
Would these satellites be self correcting their placements forever? Or could they slowly fire off the thrusters in opposite directions until they were perfectly still? No movement at all.

I think they stay in enough gravity to keep in orbit, but use propulsion to keep from getting too close.
When they stop producing propulsion the orbit decays and they head towards earth and bun up in the atmosphere.
It probably uses less energy than floating above the gravity and aligning all the time.

a reply to: Mandroid7

But would they have to keep aligning?

Can an object in space truly become stationary after being acted upon by a force?

a reply to: scraedtosleep

No. They always do corrective actions so they can be “seen” by other satellites. They expand with their host as space itself expands. Even the “geo stationary” satellites keep an equidistant from the earth as it twirls around the sun (and space expands).

Nothing in Universe is truly stationary!

Everything rotates.

From atoms to galaxies. And it is all in motion. And if you don’t believe me, Google “Concord, lunar eclipse” and watch a supersonic jet races the penumbra of the eclipse.

Just explaining that we are always in motion and there is nothing stationary.

Except maybe the Berenstein Bears!!