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Shooting Something Into the Sun is HARD (www.youtube.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/videos@lemmy.world
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Article if you'd rather read about it.

A common joke is "just launch X into the sun and be done with it". Turns out, that's actually a really difficult thing to do.

From Earth, we would have to accelerate a spacecraft to 33 m/s in the opposite direction of our orbit in order to get it to fall into the sun (without entering an elliptical orbit) For reference, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system.

This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun.

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[–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

thanks for the written article as I don't like videos for information (great for entertainment purposes and that includes the occasional edutainment but I have to be in the mood for it). The written article im a bit unsure of though. It sounds like its talking about a direct crash into the sun. technically you would be looking at just making an orbit that would degrade and not hit anything else along the way. So that it would eventually crash into the sun. That being said I don't think we should treat the sun as a garbage disposal and all the dangers about launch are way valid.

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