Trajectory

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Trajectory" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A trajectory or flight path is the path that an object with mass in motion follows through space as a function of time. In classical mechanics, a trajectory is defined by Hamiltonian mechanics via canonical coordinates; hence, a complete trajectory is defined by position and momentum, simultaneously.

The mass might be a projectile or a satellite.^[1] For example, it can be an orbit — the path of a planet, asteroid, or comet as it travels around a central mass.

In control theory, a trajectory is a time-ordered set of states of a dynamical system (see e.g. Poincaré map). In discrete mathematics, a trajectory is a sequence ${\displaystyle (f^{k}(x))_{k\in \mathbb {N} }}$ of values calculated by the iterated application of a mapping ${\displaystyle f}$ to an element ${\displaystyle x}$ of its source.