How much does the rotation of the Earth affect re-entry and could we go against it?
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I was thinking about how many things are affected by the Earth's rotation, and was wondering how much more difficult a retrograde re-entry would be (where the Earth's rotation direction is assumed prograde). I know about the Coriolis force, which states: The Coriolis effect is the behavior added by the Coriolis acceleration. The formula implies that the Coriolis acceleration is perpendicular both to the direction of the velocity of the moving mass and to the frame's rotation axis. So in particular: [...] if the velocity is against the direction of local rotation, the acceleration is inward to the axis. (On Earth, this situation occurs for a body on the equator moving west, which would deflect downward as seen by an observer.) Meaning that we'd essentially be seei