Source for the claim?
Source? It’s not exactly brain surgery…
It is, however, rocket science.
Looks like the source is a screenshot from a microblog. Hope that helps 🤗
Can someone explain why it’s easier to yeet something out of the solar system, than to yeet something into a massive gravity well?
My dumbass thanks you in advance
Just download Kerbal Space Program and it’ll all become clear. It’s a blast and accidentally teaching you orbital mechanics.
Make sure to buy the original in that case.
Do NOT buy Ksp2. That game is a very unfinished early access game which has been conpletely abandoned, and it’s shameful that it’s still listed in the Steam store.
Orbital speeds. Remember earth and by consequence everything on it is moving at 30km/s. Most efficient way to hit the sun is to cancel that out, or decelerating until your velocity relative to the sun is 0 and then gravity does the rest of the work. Orbiting a stellar object is missing with flair. It’s easier to entirely miss the sun by accelerating at roughly 12 Km/s additional velocity which will allow you to escape the sun’s gravity. Or 40% of the delta V (more velocity is not linear fuel expended either, more exponential with needing roughly 99x more fuel to do one than the other… not even accounting for the chase of now accelerating that fuel weight.)
Well, technically, the more efficient way to hit the sun would be some gravity assists into the outer solar system and then slowing down to zero at a higher point, where your orbital velocity will be lower.
Well, technically
The best kind of correct!
Operative word is “into” the sun. Hitting the sun specifically = harder vs the general “away” direction.
We’re technically falling towards the Sun.
We don’t hit it, because we’re also moving around it at a crazy speed.
So even though we’re falling, we permanently miss it. If that makes sense.
The change in speed (deceleration) it would take to slow us down enough that we fall directly towards and into the Sun… is greater than the change in speed required to go fast enough to fly away from it.
So, you need energy to either change your velocity by 30km/s, or by 12km/s.
Hence, easier to speed up a ‘little bit’ more.
A soccer player needs to either score a goal, which would be hitting the sun. Or they need to knock it out of bounds, which would be sending out of the solar system.
Both require power to drive the vehicle, but only one needs accuracy.
more like, you need to hit a goal at the bottom of a funnel-shaped pit, but you’re in a car driving in circles on the walls of the funnel at 100mph, and anything going 150 mph shoots out of the top of the funnel. aim isn’t the problem, the shape of the funnel will take care of that. the issue is to get to the bottom you have to kick the ball backward hard enough to cancel out the speed of the car, i.e. 100mph, whereas to launch out of the pit, you only have to kick the ball forward at 50mph. if you kick backwards at 50mph, the ball will just keep circling the pit at 50mph; it might eventually reach the bottom but it will take a long time
Right now you are flying, together with earth more or less the speed you need to stay orbiting the sun forever.
Add a “little” speed and you fly away
The earth is moving rapidly around the sun, so anything we launch is already orbiting the sun. To hit the sun you then have to counteract all that momentum. To escape the solar system you just have to add a bit more speed to what we already have. Though both take a lot of energy.
Yes. It’s surprisingly hard to get something to hit the sun.
What you have to do is slow down. Remember we are orbiting it.
You’d think a giant mass like that might have some helpful gravity, but we’re all in a stable orbit with a strong angular momentum.
Throw them backwards really hard.
And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
I suppose we could sent them to a Lagrange point and call it good?
I’d be satisfied with a sub-orbital parabola in the general direction of *gestures at sky*
Someone on the other end might need a mop but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But I want to picture them burning not freezing or running out of oxygen.
What about launching them into Venus? It’s smaller, and closer. Would that save on gas?
~I think I got three-fitty in my center console.~
Just wait, we’ve made an incredible little kenetic package that uses a couple pinches of accelerant max. The launch platform is larger and more complex than the package itself but it packs a punch. Launch platforms even re-usable Fuck using them as the payload, just send the payload to them. Very quickly. No need to even break orbit.
It’s surprisingly difficult to launch anything out of the solar system due to orbits and the Oort Cloud. Not saying the sun is easy, but in my opinion, it’s definitely more realistic.
I need you to understand that when I want someone launched into the sun, it’s not because it is easy, but because it is hard. I want to go to the extra effort and delta v necessary so that we can make it abundantly clear that you, evil horrible cretin, are worth the collective effort of thousands to personally be launched into the sun.
Ok, JFK, calm down.
Can we compromise by strapping them to the launch pad directly underneath the rocket before it’s ignited?
But then you miss out on all the time they would spend contemplating how they ended up in that situation, damn millenials trying to kill the record scratch industry.
you miss out on all the time they would spend contemplating how they ended up in that situation
You can leave them strapped to the pad as long as you want before igniting if you want to give them time to contemplate.
Plus, imagine how nervous they’ll be once they start hearing the countdown…
I’d be hapoy to see them anywhere on the pad considering the sound pressure can kill at that proximity regardless
But … fire.
True, but we’ve seen lots of things killed with fire. How many things have we really seen obliterated by sound pressure?
Zero propellant for operating a guillotine
But consider how cool a guillotine with a rocket would be
Hear me out, though: rocket propelled guillotine
An air compressor and some cheesewire might be simpler and lighter…
Isn’t it possible to use some swing-by maneuver around other planets to fly directly into the sun?
No idea if this has any real world application, but Kerbal Space Program taught me that launching outwards to a huge planet (Jupiter), one can get a reverse gravity assist to get an extremely narrow ellptical orbit. Then you just need a light retrograde thrust at the apoapsis, and your orbit will intersect with the sun
Yeah. Check out the path they launched the Parker Solar Probe on. That wasn’t into the Sun, but it was as close as anything we’ve ever sent up.
I’m assume the reason why is because, in order to go into the sun, 100% of Earth’s rotational velocity has to be counteracted, and it doesn’t for the opposite direction?
If you accelerate to a very high orbit, you will have nearly zero velocity at the apoapsis. From there it takes only a very small delta v to reduce your velocity to zero and fall into the sun.
Source: This is how I killed Jebidiah Kerman.
This is the part I don’t understand apparently. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy for the thing so giant that it causes other giant things to circle it suck up a tiny person relatively easily?
If the tiny person wasn’t going so fast that it’s in orbit around the big thing, yeah - all you have to do to get the person to fall in is to stop them moving. The problem is that you have to push them reeeeeal hard to get them to stop moving in orbit around the sun. (That’s what Delta-v means - change in velocity.)
So we can’t just do the same thing that we do to get something out of the solar system, but “in reverse”? Like a reverse/inverted slingshot? Use the inner planets to brake?
Or how about this, do a slingshot maneuver, but only a single one, that launches it softly straight outwards from one of the planets, in line with the sun. Then just wait until it loses momentum and starts falling straight into the sun. Would that take too long, maybe?
Like if we just dropped something into existence at 1 AU from the sun without any orbital momentum, how long would that object take to fall into the sun?
I get that it’s very difficult to send something directly into the Sun. Couldn’t you just put them into a highly eccentric and unstable orbit that would crash into the sun after several passes?
