An ellipse is an asymmetrically shaped closed oval.

任何椭都是对称封闭的椭形。

Remember too that the Moon's orbit around the Earth is an ellipse.

同样要记住的是，月亮绕地球的公转轨道是椭。

As the planet orbits the star, it makes a big circle (or ellipse) .

当行星围绕恒星运行时，会形成大(或椭)。

It has two points, called foci, which act as a combined center for an ellipse.

有点，称为焦点，作为椭的联合中心。

Well, an ellipse is a shape that resembles a kind of squashed circle.

椭是种类似于被压扁的的形状。

Its foci are two points within the ellipse that describe its shape.

的焦点是椭内描述其形状的点。

For one thing, it's not a perfect circle, it's quite an elongated ellipse.

至少不是准的形，而更像是拉长的椭。

Not only that, the Moon orbits the Earth on an ellipse.

不仅如此，月球绕地球公转的轨道是椭形的。

This ellipse has an important property called eccentricity.

椭有重要的性质，叫做离心率。

Simply put, eccentricity tells how much the ellipse deviates from a perfect circle.

简单地说，离心率表示椭与正的偏离程度。

The further apart the foci are, the more squashed the ellipse is.

焦点距离越远，椭受到的挤压就越大。

As Kepler showed, the earth's orbit is an ellipse, with the sun at one of the two focal points.

就像开普勒曾指出的，地球的轨道是椭，相对以太阳为中心绕起来的话有焦点。

And as if they were cuboidal cells that got stretched tall, their nuclei also are stretched into an ellipse.

由于们是立方体细胞，被拉伸得很高，们的细胞核也被拉伸成椭形。

For any point on the ellipse, the sum of that point's distances to the two foci is the same.

对于椭上的任意点，该点到焦点的距离之和是相同的。

Weighing all the possibilities, the computer spits out the potential area of impact in the form of a landing ellipse.

权衡过所有的可能性，计算出可能的接触区域，椭形的着陆区。

As eccentricity increases, the ellipse gets flatter and flatter until it just looks like a line.

随着偏心率的增加，椭会变得越来越平，直到看起来像条线。

An ellipse with zero eccentricity would just be a regular old circle.

偏心率为零的椭就是普通的。

To those wondering what an extreme ellipse could be, there's a great example to look at Halley's Comet.

对于那些想知道什么是极端椭的人来说，有很好的例子，那就是哈雷彗星。

In 1976, the landing ellipse for the Mars Viking Lander was 62 x 174 miles, nearly the area of New Jersey.

1976 年海盗号登陆火星的登陆椭为62 x 174 英哩， 幾乎和新澤西州的面積相當。

Instead, they generally have a stretched version of a circle, which is technically called an ellipse.

相反，们通常有形的拉伸公转，也就是椭。