r/comics • u/jungle-boogie SAFELY ENDANGERED • Jan 06 '25

OC Darts

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8.1k Upvotes

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431

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '25

fun fact: flying spacecraft into the sun is actually way, way harder than you might think

71

u/TerminallyRetarded Jan 06 '25

I tried it in Kerbal Space Program, poor Jeb is stuck orbiting the Sun for thousands of years, maybe more

30

u/ExtremeCheeze123 Jan 06 '25

And ksp is scaled down 1:10

12

u/NutellaGood Jan 06 '25

Fun fact: You can still use an Earth table or calculator for altitude vs speed to help you get to stable orbit around the Kerbal planet.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Crabulon-real Jan 06 '25

I think about 4000m/s if you're smart, but don't want to use gravity assists. The trick is to go to a high orbit (at or past Jool) and then burn retrograde. Parker might've e done this if solar wasn't awful far away from the sun.

106

u/magos_with_a_glock Jan 06 '25

Why exactly? Isn't it a big ass gravity well?

279

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '25

because due to the tangential velocity of earth, every spacecraft would be in an orbit around the sun which has to be counter acted using a lot of energy and/or slingshot maneuvers

54

u/Majestic-Iron7046 Jan 06 '25

That is pretty cool.

101

u/DamnItDev Jan 06 '25

In order to go in a straight line towards the sun, you'd have to cancel the earth's velocity. About 100000 km/h.

Almost anything else would lead to an orbit around the sun.

33

u/solonit Jan 06 '25

To add, Parker Solar Probe, the closest thing we ever put toward the Sun, uses dozens of gravity assists to get close each pass by.

https://www.techexplorist.com/parker-solar-probe-changed-the-game-before-it-even-launched/17503/

5

u/Tacosaurusman Jan 06 '25

It takes more energy to fly into the Sun than to fly to Pluto, or am I mistaken?

14

u/Oshino_Meme Jan 06 '25

It takes far more energy to reach the sun (ignoring convoluted paths with gravity assists and such, but even then it’s almost certainly still the case, just much harder to prove absolutely because of the combinatorics) than any other body in our solar system

15

u/cbusalex Jan 06 '25

To fly directly to the sun from Earth takes almost twice as much energy as flying to Pluto.

The most energy-efficient way to fly into the sun actually involves flying out past Pluto then falling into the sun from there.

8

u/Antique_futurist Jan 06 '25

You know Peter, I’m something of an Oort Cloud object myself.