Apogee kick motor possible. The mass of most geostationary satellites at the beginning of its operational life in geostationary orbit is roughly half that when it separated from its vehicle in geostationary transfer orbit, with the other half having been fuel expended in the apogee kick maneuver. Apogee kick motor An apogee kick motor (AKM) refers to a rocket motor that is regularly employed on artificial satellites to provide the final impulse to change the trajectory from the transfer orbit into its final (most commonly circular) orbit. For a satellite launched from the Earth, the rocket firing is done at the highest point
Merge sort A natural merge sort is similar to a bottom-up merge sort except that any naturally occurring runs (sorted sequences) in the input are exploited. Both monotonic and bitonic (alternating up/down) runs may be exploited, with lists (or equivalently tapes or files) being convenient data structures (used as FIFO queues or LIFO stacks). In the bottom-up merge sort, the starting point assumes each run is one item long. In practice, random input data will have many short runs that just happen to be sorted. In the typical case, the natural merge sort may not need as many passes because there are