It’s not obvious that this professor of aerospace engineering knows that the sun is the hardest place to get to in the solar system. Escape from the solar system is easier.
It’s not obvious that this professor of aerospace engineering knows that the sun is the hardest place to get to in the solar system. Escape from the solar system is easier.
Much easier to shoot it into Jupiter. Per Jack Handey, it’s an enemy planet.
“Much easier to shoot it into Jupiter”
And if you have a woody to launch it into the Sun you can use Jupiter’s gravity to swing it (the Jupiter probe back toward the Sun)
He does entertain everything except the delta vee elephant in the room.
As I recall, the DV to reach the sun from earth is around 60kps. Definitely the hardest place to reach in the solar system, even with grav assists.
However, I’m a bit more worried by the statement that the earth’s influence ends at 22,000 miles. Perhaps they’ve never heard that the moon orbits the earth?
You have to nearly zero earths velocity. Or at least create an elliptical orbit with the heliogee inside the surface of the sun.
Perihelion. Wrong terminology. If I win the mega millions, I am buying the board new software that can edit posts.
The average Sun-Earth distance is 92,955,807 miles, so the Earth travels 2*Pi*92,955,807 miles in each year (one orbit). That means we are traveling at 584.06E+6 miles/(356 days*86400 seconds/day) = 18.52 miles/second, or 97,788 ft/sec. To go directly to the Sun, you’d have to have a rocket that could have pretty much that whole velocity as Vinfinity, i,e, the leftover after escaping the Earth’s gravitation field, directed opposite the Earth’s velocity vector. So the injection burn from LEO would have to produce a velocity of SQRT(97,000^2 +36,000^2) = ~103,500 ft/sec. That’s on top of the ideal delta V of about 30,000 ft/sec to reach LEO. Orion could have done that, at the cost of contaminating our radiation belts so badly that no human could ever get into space again. No chemical rocket could ever do the job.
I’ll note that there’s two relatively efficient ways to drop stuff into the Sun: solar sails and gravity assists. Basically, you don’t need to shed all the delta-v, you just need to get your object within about 400,000 miles of the Sun’s center. Solar braking will stop it real fast even if it has high delta v.