Question

You’re stuck on a very tiny planet with a diameter of 12 km and a mass of 2 x 10^15 kg. Suppose you have a baseball and a bat and you’re bored. With all of your physics knowledge of gravitational pull, you decide to engage in a baseball game with yourself.
a. What speed would you have to throw your baseball so that it would go into a circular orbit just above the surface and return to you so that you could hit it?
b. How long (in hours) after throwing the ball should you be ready to hit it?

Answer 1

The gravitational force on the baseball from the planet will be equal to the centripetal force for the baseball to go into a circular orbit. We use this to find the speed and time period as shown below

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