how much to put them into a space suit and a car, strap them to a rocket and then fire them into orbit around Mars ?
Instructions unclear. I’m going to the moon on Delta IX.
(Edit: my dumbass just realized it’s ∆V, as in velocity. I thought Delta 5 was the name of a type of chemical propellant. Though now that I think of it, it really should be. Damn, and I work for a space company too. At least I’m just in IT).
I legitimately want to be cremated by the sun after I die. Doesn’t matter how long it takes.
Don’t worry, we all will. We all came from a sun, and will all return to one.
When the sun dies it will take the earth with it iirc so if you can wait until then you’re good
We might fix that with a bit of star lifting, disappointing sexual_tomato
Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun’s gravity well would do the heavy lifting pulling.
If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
That one’s been sitting unplayed in my library for a very long time. I guess it’s time to give it a shot.
Imagine that you’re standing on a train and have a baseball. If you throw the ball off the train, the ball will still have momentum in the direction of the train’s movement.
If you want to throw the ball to a friend the train just passed, you have to be able to throw the ball faster than the train is moving or it will never reach them.
Mythbusters did this! (Well, the ball fell to the ground, but for a split second it looked like it was hovering after being shot out of a cannon.)
“Breaking orbit” still leaves you in almost the same orbit around the sun as the earth. You need to slow down a lot to bring the periapsis of the orbit within the suns surface.
Can a solar sail be used to put a craft into the sun?
Easily. You’d just have to use it to push your orbit in the right direction at the right time. If you are like Pluto, and way out there with a very eccentric orbit, unfurling the sail as you are heading into the galaxy might make your orbit path curve through the sun itself.
That’s an interesting question. A regular sail can sail into the wind, but they have a triangular sail, and a keel with water resistance. I don’t think any of those things exist in space, so I’m going to guess no. Perhaps some sort of high efficiency propellant keel could make it possible?
My intuition would say no, but to be honest, I don’t understand the physics of either solar or watercraft sails.
As a certified small keelboat skipper, I understand watercraft sails. I think I understand solar sails, but not nearly as well. I know Stephen Hawking wanted to send a bunch of micro drones to Alpha Centauri using solar sails powered by on-board lasers. That seems like the whole fan on a boat pointed at a sail situation, which doesn’t work on earth, so maybe I don’t actually understand solar sails. I’m definitely not going to say that Stephen Motherfucking Hawking was wrong about his area of expertise.
Edit: I got really curious about this after posting and looked into it more. The project was called The Breakthrough Starshot, and I misremembered the configuration. The lasers weren’t onboard the spacecraft, they would have been earth or satellite based. So I guess I do understand how solar sails work. When photons hit the sail, they impart some of their momentum to the sail, and the attached spacecraft. Since billions of photons are hitting the sail every second, all those tiny little pushes provide forward momentum. I’m still not sure if you can use a high efficiency propellant keel to sail towards the light source or not, but I’m thinking probably “no”.
