When wanting to exit our solar system, do we have to always go outward from the sun in the direction of the other planets? Or can we simply travel “north”?
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We can. We have done something similar with a probe around sun where it travelled on the perpendicular axis. Problem is, things are very far away that way, so there’s little practical reason with what we have
We can, but its way harder to do.
We generally start rockets as close to the equator as possible and almost always fly east so the rocket carries as much momentum as possible.
If you were to fly north, earths rotation doesnt boost you. Fly west and youd even have to spend extra fuel/energy to cancel out your momentum.
Same thing applies in the solar system just in a larger scale.
Going ‘up’ or ‘down’ requires more energy than just going the direction earth is already moving in at 30 km/s
By using the planets ships can gain a gravity assist or slingshot effect from the other planets gaining a greater velocity than could be achieved by rocket power alone, Voyager 2 did go vertical half way through its journey, but other than the planetary plane there isn’t much to see in the solar system. https://youtu.be/Zu-Sp3I0c1Q
Well there’s no “north” in space but if you mean can we travel above or below the plane of the solar system, sure, you can go any direction you want. We just don’t because there’s nothing there. Also it’s harder because we can’t take advantage of gravity assists from the planets to help us leave the solar system.
currently we are exploring the other planets in our system so it makes sense to go towards them .
yes we could go perpendicular to our system, but there’s a big advantage to using the gravity of our moon to help us sling out faster. and our probes that go out to the further plants again do the same with the planets as they swing by. its like a sailboat tacking across the wind, it ends up going faster sideways.
You can leave in any direction you want, but the suns gravity makes this very hard.
You need to speed up a lot to leave the solar system.
You can do a bit of trick by taking advantage of the fact that the earth is already orbiting the sun and using that speed as a base similar to the way you launch from near the equator when leaving earth to take advantage of the earths rotation.
If you do that you fly of in the plane that earth (and all the other planets and stuff) orbit the sun.
You can also take advantage of heavy objects like planets or the sun itself to fling yourself outwards by first letting yourself get pulled in by their gravity. To slingshot like this you need to get near them.
You totally don’t have to do any of that. It just saves fuel.
Of course saving fuel is a huge part of rocket science anyway so you do have to do it.
You could but you never would. Since the earth is orbiting the sun, your rocket is already orbiting the sun. This means it’s already moving at some 100,000km/h and you can use that speed to help you exit the solar system. If you wanted to travel “north” then you need to bring extra fuel.
You could exit the solar system in an orbit that goes through the perpendicular plane, which is not quite going straight North, just like no spacecraft goes straight outwards either, they just move in orbits within Earth’s orbital plane or close to that. This is because this way you take advantage of Earths orbital speed and you have the opportunity to slingshot with other planets as they are all in similar planes.
To move in the perpendicular plane it would mean you have to cancel Earths orbital speed itself so it’s wasteful, but maybe feasible. To go straight North or straight outwards means you have to fight gravity constantly so it’s extremely inneficient and not feasible at all.
It’d take more than twice as much fuel
The escape velocity of the sun when you start at Earth is a bit under 60 km/s, but you start at 42 km/s which is Earth’s orbital velocity so to leave you need to just add another 18 km/s in the same direction as the current orbit and you’re good
If instead you burn north/south(perpendicular to the plane the planets orbit in) then Pythagoras says you’d need to add about 42 km/s of speed in that direction to get the 60 required to leave, that’s over twice the speed and way over twice the fuel required
From a fuel perspective it’s better to burn outwards, fly past Pluto, stop, then fly north in the same way it takes less fuel (but more time) to fly out and stop and fall back towards the sun than to slow down to get to the sun
For the most part though we’re only launching probes to look at things in our system so we stick with launching them out towards the outer planets because getting to anything interesting beyond our system would likely take a century or more even if that’s the only goal
Apparently because of the gravitational reasons already mentioned here, the way to do it is to start on the orbital plane and gradually raise the angle of exit over several orbits, so eventually you’re traveling far enough ‘north’ to escape while still maintaining some momentum. You would never get to 90*, but you wouldn’t need to.
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