noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A form of aerobraking in which a spacecraft uses atmospheric drag to decelerate from a hyperbolic trajectory into a closed orbit, eliminating the need for a large orbital-insertion burn and requiring only small correction burns to raise the spacecraft's periapsis out of the atmosphere. countable, uncountable

Verb

1. 1
   To perform (an) aerocapture. intransitive

Etymology

From aero- + capture.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.