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Concept
Spheroid
Summary
A spheroid, also known as an ellipsoid of revolution or rotational ellipsoid, is a quadric surface obtained by rotating an ellipse about one of its principal axes; in other words, an ellipsoid with two equal semi-diameters. A spheroid has circular symmetry.
If the ellipse is rotated about its major axis, the result is a prolate spheroid, elongated like a rugby ball. The American football is similar but has a pointier end than a spheroid could. If the ellipse is rotated about its minor axis, the result is an oblate spheroid, flattened like a lentil or a plain M&M. If the generating ellipse is a circle, the result is a sphere.
Due to the combined effects of gravity and rotation, the figure of the Earth (and of all planets) is not quite a sphere, but instead is slightly flattened in the direction of its axis of rotation. For that reason, in cartography and geodesy the Earth is often approximated by an oblate spheroid, known as the reference ellipsoid, instead of a sphere. The current World Geodetic System model uses a spheroid whose radius is at the Equator and at the poles.
The word spheroid originally meant "an approximately spherical body", admitting irregularities even beyond the bi- or tri-axial ellipsoidal shape; that is how the term is used in some older papers on geodesy (for example, referring to truncated spherical harmonic expansions of the Earth's gravity geopotential model).
The equation of a tri-axial ellipsoid centred at the origin with semi-axes a, b and c aligned along the coordinate axes is
The equation of a spheroid with z as the symmetry axis is given by setting a = b:
The semi-axis a is the equatorial radius of the spheroid, and c is the distance from centre to pole along the symmetry axis. There are two possible cases:
c < a: oblate spheroid
c > a: prolate spheroid
The case of a = c reduces to a sphere.
An oblate spheroid with c < a has surface area
The oblate spheroid is generated by rotation about the z-axis of an ellipse with semi-major axis a and semi-minor axis c, therefore e may be identified as the eccentricity.
Official source
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