Shooting Something Into the Sun is HARD

Article if you’d rather read about it.

A common joke is “just launch X into the sun and be done with it”. Turns out, that’s actually a really difficult thing to do.

From Earth, we would have to accelerate a spacecraft to 33 m/s in the opposite direction of our orbit in order to get it to fall into the sun (without entering an elliptical orbit) For reference, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system.

This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun.

HubertManne,
HubertManne avatar

thanks for the written article as I don't like videos for information (great for entertainment purposes and that includes the occasional edutainment but I have to be in the mood for it). The written article im a bit unsure of though. It sounds like its talking about a direct crash into the sun. technically you would be looking at just making an orbit that would degrade and not hit anything else along the way. So that it would eventually crash into the sun. That being said I don't think we should treat the sun as a garbage disposal and all the dangers about launch are way valid.

yokonzo,

Yeah the article is a bit lackluster, barely digs into all the science

hemko,

It just makes sense if you think about it. It also takes some 50%+ more velocity to go to the sun from Mercury than from Earth, due to Mercury orbiting sun at the speed of 47km/s

Donjuanme,

Or you just let it be elliptical for a while and that shit will burn up before very long.

You don’t need to hit the center of the sun to be incinerated by it.

Quetzalcutlass, (edited )

You occasionally hear of houses being hit by fragments of deorbited space stations or things like that. I’m wondering how much of our trash would survive a shallow reentry.

And also how bad spreading its aerosolized forms across hundreds of miles would be in the long run.

bstix,

Also, nuclear fuel is not renewable. There is a finite amount.

Imagine future generations hearing about the idiots who wanted to throw the barely used uranium into the sun.

ptz,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

The “what” gets shot into the sun is less important, lol. I just found it interesting that shooting anything into our sun is more difficult than sending it to another sun.

bstix,

I know and it’s an interesting video. It’s just that I’ve seen that suggestion posted seriously more often than it should be.

thessnake03, (edited )

In case you want to watch it from the beginning, took out the time stamp

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g

ptz,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Thanks for that. I was watching it via the embed in the article and didn’t realize the YT link I copied had the timestamp from my current position.

Updated the post.

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