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.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Or you just let it be elliptical for a while and that shit will burn up before very long.

    You don’t need to hit the center of the sun to be incinerated by it.

    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      You occasionally hear of houses being hit by fragments of deorbited space stations or things like that. I’m wondering how much of our trash would survive a shallow reentry.

      And also how bad spreading its aerosolized forms across hundreds of miles would be in the long run.