this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Thats inefficient, you dont need to cancel the angular momentum as there was no time limit on how long it takes rhe child to enter the sun and there also was not a specified required trajectory. The child can just spiral into the sun

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There are no spiral orbits. Canceling the forward motion is exactly what you need to do, to bring down the next periapsis to 0. Now, you can go with a periapsis of about half a million km, because the sun is pretty big, but that is not a significant difference. Getting anywhere near the sun, is the hard part.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It's much more efficient in this case to do a bi-elliptic transfer: raise apoapsis very far out, then lower your periapsis once you are at apoapsis. Wikipedia says you could do it with about 8.8 km/s delta v. Versus 24 or so for a basic Hohman transfer (still a bit better than 30)

Sadly the bi-elliptic transfer requires two burns so you can't do it with a kick.

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