Momentum motion. The first use of "momentum" in its proper mathematical sense is not clear but by the time of Jenning's "Miscellanea" in 1721, five years before the final edition of Newton's "Principia Mathematica", momentum or "quantity of motion" was being defined for students as "a rectangle", the product of and , where is "quantity of material" and is "velocity", . Momentum In Newtonian mechanics, linear momentum, translational momentum, or simply momentum (pl. momenta) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction in three-dimensional space. If is
Propellant mass fraction important role in the rocket equation: Where formula_10 is the ratio of final mass to initial mass (i.e., one minus the mass fraction), formula_11 is the change in the vehicle's velocity as a result of the fuel burn and formula_12 is the effective exhaust velocity (see below). The term effective exhaust velocity is defined as: where "I" is the fuel's specific impulse in seconds and "g" is the "standard acceleration of gravity" (note that this is not the local acceleration of gravity). To make a powered landing from orbit on a celestial body without an atmosphere requires the same mass