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Firstly the Sun itself rotates roughly once a month, and secondly if the probe wasn't going round the sun, it would be called the Solar Impactor, not the Solar
by grues-dinner 2y ago
Firstly the Sun itself rotates roughly once a month, and secondly if the probe wasn't going round the sun, it would be called the Solar Impactor, not the Solar Orbiter. Or maybe the Solar Evaporated Slag Cloud when it got close enough.
- airstrike 2y agoI just wanted to say I appreciate every single one of your comments on this thread but this one even more so
- lovecg 2y agoWell it could also be in the Sun’s equivalent of a geostationary orbit. If ChatGPT is not making things up this would be around 60 million km which is quite feasible.
- alfiopuglisi 2y agoIt's quite difficult with current rocket technology: you have to counteract most of the Earth-given 30km/s speed around the Sun in order to get close (it's smaller than Mercury's orbit), and then brake again to circularize the orbit once you are there. I am not sure that it can be done with what we have now. That said, it's not that far off either.
- martinpw 2y agoI guess ChatGPT is making things up because it is much less than that. Closer to 25million km, although complicated by the fact that the sun does not rotate as a rigid body but instead rotates faster at the equator than the poles.
- grues-dinner 2y agoThere's also no such thing as a single heliosynchronous orbit, because different latitudes of the Sun rotate at different speeds. So an orbit which keeps a point on the equator (25 day period) under it would see the polar regions (36 days) rotating backwards. Every three equatorial rotations or so, you'd "lap" the polar region, which would only make 2 rotations in that time.