Centripetal vs. centrifugal

Sep 15, 2021
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It was impossible to deal with this matter by sending a comment either to the Space.com e-mail address or to the report involved in a mistake. The first option makes it necessary to register my tablet at the Amazon.com website, but one can't do that if one doesn't have a working cellphone. Mine is an old and small but powerful M.... Cingular I stopped using years ago because in my present circumstances I need no phones. There is no second option either because the report was published on Sept. 1st and allows no comments anymore.

The mistake is in the following passage of "How fast is Earth moving?": "(...) centripetal acceleration only counteracts Earth's gravity by 0.3 percent."

The centripetal force acts towards the center of rotation, and so what it does is the opposite of what the passage says: it reinforces the gravitational pull, whereas the centrifugal force acts away from the center of rotation and is what "counteracts" that pull.
 

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