Did you know that if we took all the rhinos left on the planet, put them in a rocket ship and launched it towards the sun, the would travel 91.511 million mi, and die along the way?
Akshually we currently have no rocket with enough power to launch that much mass towards the Sun. People always assume because the Sun has a lot of gravity, stuff moves toward it automatically. But when launching from Earth that’s not the case. Earth is in orbit around the Sun, in order to get to the Sun you need to lose all that energy. Since rhino’s are heavy af you’d need a mighty rocket indeed.
We could with some effort maybe launch one small rhino, say 600-700kg towards the Sun. And it requires some fancy ass orbital mechanics. So it would travel way more than 91.511 million miles before ending up in the Sun. This rhino would probably not survive the launch, which is just as well given its destination and travel time.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
While getting a rocket or probe to hit the sun smack in the middle sounds hard to do, you can get obliterated by it with much less delta-v.
You need to get to the Earth’s escape velocity and just cleverly align the angle of escape so that you get an eccentric enough heliocentric orbit that you’d end up some 6 million kms close to the sun. Anything closer than that is literally overkill.
Did you know that if we took all the rhinos left on the planet, put them in a rocket ship and launched it towards the sun, the would travel 91.511 million mi, and die along the way?
Akshually we currently have no rocket with enough power to launch that much mass towards the Sun. People always assume because the Sun has a lot of gravity, stuff moves toward it automatically. But when launching from Earth that’s not the case. Earth is in orbit around the Sun, in order to get to the Sun you need to lose all that energy. Since rhino’s are heavy af you’d need a mighty rocket indeed.
We could with some effort maybe launch one small rhino, say 600-700kg towards the Sun. And it requires some fancy ass orbital mechanics. So it would travel way more than 91.511 million miles before ending up in the Sun. This rhino would probably not survive the launch, which is just as well given its destination and travel time.
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“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55201/orbital-mechanics-and-launching-into-the-sun
You need multitudes more energy to get to a sun orbit than you need to leave the solar system.
While getting a rocket or probe to hit the sun smack in the middle sounds hard to do, you can get obliterated by it with much less delta-v.
You need to get to the Earth’s escape velocity and just cleverly align the angle of escape so that you get an eccentric enough heliocentric orbit that you’d end up some 6 million kms close to the sun. Anything closer than that is literally overkill.
Also we don’t launch towards the sun, we deorbit by burning in the opposite direction of where the earth is moving towards.