4 ms·

What’s the cost of just flinging it out into space towards the sun?

• ineedasername 7y ago
  More than the 79kg of fuel it has on board.
• lorenzhs 7y ago
  That's kinda not how orbits work. First, to get to the sun, you have to escape Earth's gravity, which takes a lot of power. Once you've done so, the sun is actually one of the hardest places to go. It's easier to leave the solar system altogether than to drop into the sun.
  • Dylan16807 7y ago
    Depends on how long you're willing to wait. In rough rounded numbers: Earth's velocity around the sun is 30km/s. To directly slow down enough to hit the sun, you need to remove 20km/s. To leave the solar system you need an extra 10km/s. But if you almost leave the solar system, and wait for the very peak of your orbit, then you'll be going so slowly that you can turn it into a pure dive into the center of the sun with almost zero thrust. So this plan needs slightly less thrust than escaping entirely. It will just take decades to centuries.
  • Aperocky 7y ago
    > hardest The best way to end up as a sun meteor is to boost the orbit to Jupiter and let a flyby of Jupiter kill the remaining horizontal velocity.
• zymhan 7y ago
  The cost is, pun intended, astronomical. We have launched satellites towards the sun, to visit Venus and such, but they take months to get there, and there is still a lot further to go if you want to get to the sun.
• kleer001 7y ago
  A lot. The gravity well is deep and steep and wide. And satellites are placed as far down it as possible.
• mumblemumble 7y ago
  To throw some numbers at it: The sun's escape velocity is about 42 km/s. Earth's orbital velocity is about 30km/s. To go straight from Earth to the sun, you'd need to shed almost all that speed, meaning you'd need to accelerate by nearly 30km/s. To leave the solar system, you'd only need to accelerate by about 12km/s. That said, as someone else pointed out, there's an interesting irony: Since objects closer to the sun orbit faster than ones that are far away, the cost to go to the sun is generally higher the closer you are. (The exception is if you're already more-or-less on a collision course.) So, if you've got the time, it's cheaper to go away first. You can think of it as sort of a way of using the sun's gravity to do most the work of slowing you down. If we replace "toward the sun" with "away from earth", you'd have to get to a bit over 11km/s relative to earth. From geostationary orbit (3ish km/s), that's kind of expensive. Again with the counter-intuitive, it's actually cheaper to get away from Earth from low earth orbit, where you'd be starting from a speed of more like 7km/s. This all starts feeling really intuitive after a couple hours of playing Kerbal Space Program. :)
• outworlder 7y ago
  It's easier to make it chase Voyager.