A friend told me that with the current engineering we cannot send a satellite to the sun (just reaching it, not survival) because we would have to nullify the velocity of earth with respect to the sun. I’m not sure I understand and not sure if that is true.
In: Physics
Earth isn’t falling into the sun because it’s in orbit. It’s going so fast to the side that by the time it would have fallen into the sun, it’s moved out of the way. If you want a spacecraft to get to the sun, you have to stop moving as fast at the Earth is. But in space, there’s no land or air to slow you down. So, instead, you point your rockets in the direction that you’re moving towards and fire for the same amount of time that you would to get to that original speed from a standing start. Then, you’ll keep being pulled toward the sun, but you won’t go to the side at all, and you’ll just fall into the sun. But it takes a *lot* of fuel to do that. Like, way too much to be viable. Going to Mars, for example, just takes speeding up from Earth’s orbit a bit. That way, you’re moving faster to the side than you’re falling, and you’ll get further away from the sun before your arc takes you back down. Then, you just match’s Mars’s speed as you approach it, and you can enter its orbit. That takes a *lot* less fuel than just dropping straight into the sun.
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