I saw a meme that stated that, if you’re mad at someone, it take less Delta-V to launch them out of the solar system than in does to fire them into the Sun.
Why is that? Wouldn’t the attraction of the Sun’s mass be greater and provide assistance?
In: Physics
Imagine you’re a superhero on the roof of a speeding truck, it’s going 100 km/h.
You need to jump off the truck to the ground, and in order to not hurt yourself and scrape your knee, you need to be falling *straight downwards* when you land. You can’t have any horizontal momentum.
This means you’re gonna have to be able to launch yourself backwards off the back of the truck at 100km/h, so that your launch speed counteracts the speed of the truck and your resultant ground speed is 0km/h.
In order to make something fall *into* the sun, instead of falling into orbit around it, we need to do basically the same thing, except the moving truck is the earth and it’s going 30km per second.
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