It is easy to hit the sun. Just wait for our Sun to become a Red Giant and swallow up the Earth. Like all other tasks, they key to success is patience.
but then unclear wast woudnt be dangerous for the sun to turn into a red giant it take 4 billion years to become a red giant and it take thousands of years to become"stable"
Or simply replace all the current uranium reactors with thorium-powered molten-salt reactors, and stop producing the radioactive waste. We are using uranium because america and russia researched it because they wanted the waste to put in weapons.
How long will a day be on the sun? Well, there was first the night, then there's 10 billion years of day, then there's an almost eternal night with a little light.
Edit: I did the math, and it is really hard. The Moon, Earth, and the inner planets don't have enough gravity *at their effective surface* to counteract Earth's initial velocity.
Astronauts on Space Shuttle Columbia: *Why do I hear boss music?* Columbia Space Shuttle Rocket Tank Boosters: Time for me to go boom boom like a firework boom boom! *Explodes*
What I have always wondered in ksp is what your orbit would look like if you burned retrograde on the side of an eliptical orbit centered around the edges.
Hitting the Sun is hard Expectation: Yea, Sun is so hot that the rocket will melt before it hits the Sun! Reality: You can`t hit the sun because Earth is moving fast or something.
It's very fuel inefficient to go to the sun directly because it needs to cancel the movement of the earth. Earth -> Orbit around earth is around 10km dv Orbit around earth -> Escape solar system is about 11km dv Orbit around earth -> Crash in sun is 30 km dv Orbit around earth -> near Pluto -> Crash in sun is about 8km dv
I knew this just from playing Kerbal Space Program. What I didn't know is that it would be easier and more fuel efficient to wait until I'm further out. Now I want to try a close fly-by of the sun on KSP.
The problem with that is that no little Missile has 30km/s of delta-v. An a missile built for use in our atmosphere would not be able to maneuver in the vacuum of space. These are just two of the things wrong with your idea.
Since sun is not a point object, the final velocity need not be zero to crash.. the velocity components should be such that it ensures that the resultant elliptic path passes through sun..
+Jane Black Melting nuclear waste does not make it inert. In fact it makes it worse. Instead of a solid spent uranium, you now have liquid uranium, which is just as radioactive. Or worse yet, if it vapourizes, it then creates a radioactive cloud. Also, if it misses the sun, it then has enough velocity to make it back to Earth's orbital position. Similar to how a comet that misses the sun continues back to where it came from. So, it could eventually strike the Earth after several orbits.
+Nathan Clark - Nothing Serious Considering that the Earth is flat, the Sun doesn't disappear during the night and it is only a ilussion....in fact the Sun only goes underneath the Earth.
As a KSP player, I confirm this. But you don't need to cancel all your orbital velocity, just enough that your periapsis will be below a certain distance from the sun.
Ze Rubenator It's pretty cool actually, because all the other numbers are corrected i.e. rockets are 10x more powerful, so there's not too much difference in gameplay.
Orbital mechanics are much easier to learn and understand if you're the one controlling the craft, and are able to see exactly where you're going with nice big blue lines.
You need about 16.7 km/s to leave Solar System if you start from Earth surface. 11 km/s is only enough to escape Earth gravity field (you will still be in orbit around the Sun). It is still less than 30 km/s to hit the Sun, but "Minute Physics" channel should not make such mistakes.
@Romano Coombs Being a grammer nazi is stupid. But facts on the other hand need to be delivered correctly. People do memorize this stuff and then share it as if it were fact.
I think the numbers stated in the video is the velocity needed after leaving Earth's gravity potential. If you're not moving, starting from Earth's orbital radius you need 42Km/s to leave the solar system. If you accelerate in the same direction as the Earth's velocity, then you need an additional 12Km/s (close to the 11 Km/s stated in the video.)
why does everyone want to send radioactive waste to space. isn't there at least a chance that this stuff will be useful in the future? and more important isn't all that fuel and the rockets and stuff just a gigantic waste of material?
You're right. Most nuclear waste is unprocessed uranium, which is still very useful. In theory, it could be reprocessed in a breeder reactor again and again until *all* the energy is extracted. But our current reactors are like burning wood and throwing away the coals before they have a chance to turn to ash or at least burn more wood.
People often over exaggerate when they talk about nuclear waste. It's often lasts not as much as people say, and there is a smaller amount than what most people imagine. Most nuclear waste is spent fuel rods, which are in small volume and used up slowly. In reality sticking them in shielded containers at some abandoned mine is a good enough of a solution.
Depends what you mean by "most". I'm pretty sure by mass, most nuclear waste is contaminated haz mat suits and other similar items that are mildly radioactive.
The problem with nuclear waste is not that we don't know what to do with it. The technology for reprocessing and recycling nuclear waste was developed decades ago. Politics and economics are the major reasons it is not done. Besides the political complications, of the potential to separate plutonium during the process, try convincing anyone a nuclear waste reprocessing facility would be good for their community. The benefits of reprocessing are that it shortens the lifetime of the remaining waste, reduces the total volume of waste, and allows the recycling of spent nuclear fuel. The research is there, this issue has been studied in depth for years. There are so many ways to handle nuclear waste, the problem is finding one acceptable to society and getting is licenced and built.
Since Chernobyl. society has gotten rly Anti Nuclear power. Which is understandable. somethinglike chernobyl should NEVER happen again. But, politics crashed projects like the MSR and societies "Anti Nuclear" movement kinda blocks research...
We’ve already solved the issue of nuclear waste disposal. There’s a company called Deep Isolation that drills super deep boreholes with oil drilling equipment. Twelve 18’’ boreholes drilled on site can dispose of all the nuclear waste a power plant will ever produce in its entire lifetime at depths that ensure it will never be a threat to anyone ever again.
Because the Sun is gaseous, different sections rotate at different speeds. At the surface, the area around the equator rotates once about every 25 days. The Sun's north and south poles rotate more slowly. It can take those areas more than 30 days to complete one rotation
Actually, radiation from the waste from nuclear reactors they're capable of building today will drop below background levels in just 300 years, and for the ones they have on the drawing board, there'll be basically no waste at all, making nuclear power sustainable. So many science blogs and channels I like just don't seem to want to update their info on nuclear power. Why is that?
You mean fusion? Because people have been promising fusion forever, and nobody has demonstrated it being viable anytime soon. There's literally no reason to get excited.
seigeengine I think he meant fusion, yeah. But I didn't get into thorium power, which is a whole other ball of wax and one I think there is reason to get excited about, not least of which are safe waste, no chance of meltdown, and too difficult to weaponize. India is going to get online this year the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor running on thorium, and in the US there are designs for molten salt reactors that are even more impressive.
Surely nuclear power being sustainable has less to do with the waste that is produced and more to do with how long you can sustain it, hence the name. I would argue it is also sustainable under that criterion, but you do have to be specific.
You can actually demonstrate how hard pretty easily, just hold a string with a heavy object attached to one end, start spinning it around you, now, while it’s still spinning around you, pull in on the string to pull the object closer, not only will it be very difficult to pull it in as the object will pull back quite hard, it will also start spinning faster
What if two suns collided? Would they simply absorb one another, like two drops of water... or would the mixing gases cause some kind of chain reaction or stellar explosion? Also... Sun has more gravity... does this affect the flow of time on said sun? If so [we know it does] then by how much? Is it significant? Does the center of the galaxy, with much more gravity, run at a slower rate of time, than the outer edge, which has much less density and gravity because its so dispersed out there?
I think maybe they will absorb to become much bigger and brighter, but I'm not to sure. I wonder what would happen to the planets, though? (I know not all stars have planets that revolve around them, but if the two stars that hit each other have planets that revolve around them, what would happen?) Would the planets all revolve around the bigger star in the same size, shape, etc. of their orbit? And what about the moons?
It depends entirely on their masses. Between a range of anywhere from 3 to 20 solar masses combined, a star would supernova and collapse into a black hole. With just two suns, however, they would simply combine into one larger and brighter star.
@@danielbarner1646 The only situation in which this could happen without disturbing the planets would be if two binary stars collided. As I said, if their mass totals to less than 3 suns then they'd simply combine to be one star and the planets would continue their orbits largely unchanged because the total mass and the centre of that mass hasn't changed.
Since the orbital velocity is higher closer to the sun, couldn't we just point at the sun and boost towards it even with the 30km/s velocity from earth? Cause then once we got to say, Mercury, we'd have a sideways velocity of 30 km/s still, but now in a region where we require 48 km/s to stay orbiting the sun. And since we boosted directly at the sun the 30 km/s won't be fast enough to push us around the sun. Even if it's not more efficient than going to the edge or using a gravity assist, wouldn't it still work? Or how much fuel would you need to be able to boost long enough to make it work?
No because we don't need 48 km/s to orbit the sun. If we just had a tiny bit of speed left, we will still fall into orbit around the sun, just a highly elliptical one.
@@PixelmanPXP we dont need 48km/s to orbit where we are, but since we're boosting directly at the sun our required velocity of 30km/s will increase. When we get to the point of mercury's orbit, we will require 48km/s to stay in orbit. And, since we launched from earth and never boosted sideways, we still only have a 30km/s velocity. So, by boosting directly at the sun we keep that "orbital" velocity of 30 km/s. And, instead of boosting to bring this speed to 0, we boost directly at the sun so that our required velocity is far greater than 30. There 100% guaranteed is a point of "if we boost this much directly at the sun" then we will hit the sun.
What you're missing is that moving towards the Sun causes the rocket to move faster, as it's experiencing a greater gravitational attraction as it gets closer. This doesn't work: - I'm moving at 30km/s right now, due to being on Earth - I fire my rocket at right angle to Earth's direction of motion, and towards the Sun - Now that I'm closer to the Sun, my sideways speed is still 30km/s In reality, your speed will be higher
@@TheRussell747 "if we boost this much directly at the sun, we will hit the sun" If you can get close to the speed of light it should work. In the 8 minute journey to the sun, you'll cover a sideways distance of 30 × 8 × 60 = 14,400 km, which is less than the diameter of the Sun (~700,000 km)
1:29 - um, no, escape velocity from the sun when you start at the earth is 42km/s escape from the earth (but still trapped in the solar system) is 11km/s
2:05 Bi-elliptical transfer! (Only part of it, though…) It is more efficient than a Hohmann transfer if the ratio between the two orbital radii is greater than 11.94:1 or 1:11.94, depending on whether the target orbit is closer to or further away from the center/centre of mass. In the video, no deceleration burn is required because the perihelion (periapsis of an object orbiting the Sun) is negative, relative to surface level (which you cannot stand on because it is gaseous).
There either are no days on the sun or it's always day on the sun. I'd have to know how a day is defined when it comes to stars. Can it even be applied to stars? Like, can a star only have days if they're a smaller star orbiting around a larger one?
A day on the sun or any star is defined by how long it takes to make one full rotation. This is more complex than it would be for a solid planet like the earth as a gaseous body like the sun rotates faster at its equator than it does at higher or lower latitudes. The sun takes 25 days to rotate at its equator and 36 days to rotate nearer its poles. If you'd like to know something you can always look it up.
Well a day means the time it takes for a celestial object to revolves once on its own axis. So if you know the speed and the circumference (assuming the object is approximately circular), you can calculate how long a day lasts on any rotating celestial objects.
lets define a "day" on a solo star as the time it would take for a point 90° from the axis of rotation to make a full rotation to its starting position
***** The surface of the sun is a liquid? It might seem like petty detail to you, but the surface of the sun, like it's inside, is actually kinda gaseous. It's a plasma, an ionised gas, if that's of any relevance.
Nope, it would 'fall around' the sun and get faster on its way there, but that additional speed would fling it back to its starting position. It would orbit around the sun in an oval
I think the trouble is that it might find a relatively stable (though maybe very eccentric for a while?) orbit. If it has even just a little velocity, it'll speed up as it approaches the sun, which will cause it to whip around instead of go in. I suppose depending on how close the approach is each time, it might lose some velocity by friction with the sun, but that would have to be awfully close (the reason orbits around the Earth decay so fast is because they start interacting with the atmosphere, which provides braking).
***** True. But all of those bits of thrust end up adding up to (at least pretty close to) the total required -30km/s. It's just a matter of whether you execute it by going "skrreeeeeeeek! stop" or "tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . (several thousand more taps here) . . . okay now we've stopped".
I recently tried to get to the sun in a space sim. It is extremely hard to do by just leaving earth and slowing down. That amount of fuel you need weighs so much it’s basically impossible to launch it all in one go. It’s easier to go away from the sun because you already have the forward momentum, just speed up and you can sling shot out.
@@PandaA1257 Did you even know what the Roche limit is when you wrote this comment?? Without completely nullifying its orbital speed, any craft headed for the sun would end up whipping around the sun and being thrown right back out to the distance it originally came from around the orbit of Earth. Considering the Roche limit would be even worse, as it simply means the craft would break apart while passing the sun. The Roche limit doesn't mean the craft somehow magically just stops moving... -_- You'd literally just get a shotgun spray of radioactive material and rocket parts headed right back towards Earth.
@@wexer82 I'll help you out. Low Earth orbits decay because there is a small amount of air in those orbits that causes drag. That slows down objects in orbit, and causes their altitude to lower further, which increases the drag even more. That continues until the object reenters. Above about 1000 miles, there is essentially no drag at all, and those orbits will be stable nearly forever. There is also essentially no drag on orbits around the Sun, unless you're really really really close to the Sun.
why not turn that waste into more energy, I mean only like 2-5% of the energy in uranium and plutonium are used in a water reactor, maybe we could use the theorized liquid salt reactor (which theoretically can't melt down) it is far more efficient then our current gen reactor's.
If you send something into space, it will hit something. Maybe not today, probably not tomorrow, but at some point, it will ruin someone's day. And that is why Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space - conservation of energy and the fact that space is not "empty".
If you send it out of earth's orbit even enough to make it 1m/s different than the earth's orbit I highly doubt you'll see it ever again. Especially if there is a small tilt in the orbit compared to earth's. Either way it's a waste just put it in some cave a little concrete and lead and forget about it.
Honestly...Shitty movie where the religious fanatic Murikan are forced to incorporate a religious story into a scientific movie, tons of things could do a better scenario than a crazy Christian thinking that his words are the words of gods... Even aliens would have been better than that, or radiation mutation that make a sort of human zombie or anything. Example : Coronal mass ejection toward their ship, they now loose most of their equipment, one of them was not inside a shielded area and is now slowly dying from radiations, they try their best to survive and finish their mission. They find the other ship which had a catastrophic failure, an hydrogen tank exploded after a collision with an object (just a small rock in orbit around the sun) damaging tons of systems and killing everyone on board except one which survive but who is barely alive. While the second crew tried to take the system of the first ship to repair their one, the survivor don't want them to do it, this ship allow him to survive and all his friend on-board were killed inside, for him this ship should not be scavenged, and while trying to stop the second team, he kill accidentally one of them, but then open his eyes and realise what he just did, help them, but this is hard, a lot of problems are still occurring on both ships and with their current state, none can get close enough to the sun without having key system surviving radiations/heat, but they don't have time anymore, because if they stop decelerating for too long they miss the sun... They are forced to repair the rest of the ship while it cruise toward the sun, giving them really short time to fix everything, some are forced to sacrifice themselves for accomplishing the mission, and even if this is hard to watch someone die, well there is no turning back cause of the state of the "return vehicle" so they know they are all doomed, but at the end, they finish on time their mission even if it was barely done on time. A movie that could focus on human experience, view on life and death, our reaction to someone dying even if we know we would not survive, and that we know we will die soon and there is no escape, knowing that each failure can cost the short amount of life time we've left and fighting, not for our life but for our planet, the life of everyone on Earth... This will be a way better movie IMO... And even there I tried to stay close to the original without the religious/fanatic bullshit, but it can be really different if we want. As a lot of Hollywood movie, mainly anime adaptation, good/great idea, shitty movie at the end.
Maybe it is, but the idea of the god loving stupid guy supposed to be a great astronaut with incredible competences to be sure that this planet saving mission won't fail is just so stupid that it waste the whole movie for me... And well, I agree with you but there is explanations : 1) When we put money out of the equation, we can do what will be consider now with our stupid money as miracle, don't worry if an imminent extinction of everyone on Earth is going to happen, we will strangely forget those paper and take decade if not century of technological advancement in minutes. 2/3) Nuclear engine, it can also have solar sail with his huge shield on the front, or having what we call a "Bussard Ramjet" which will make sense if we are heading toward the sun and won't require us to have any fuel tanks, not even power generators, the shield could act as a giant photovoltaic panel which keep his efficiency with temperature etc etc. There is tons of solutions that we are actually able to develop today, but money, as always... 4) We can use things like large scale laser cooling, maybe some tricks with thermal supraconductor used as heatshield by using the front shield to produce tons of energy to power a lot of laser cooling units. 5) And again those are things with no money and stupid politics limit that can be archived in a really short time, I mean finding the solution not building the things, but it will be relatively fast to make it compare to our actual money/politic limiting, stupidity based system. During the ejection of the crew using a launch escape tower system during the failed launch attempt of Soyuz T-10-1, the crew had face acceleration up to 17g. If we really want we can make a really high acceleration ship but we have no use for that, but fighting against 28g for a long enough time to get in a safe distance to perform a less brutal acceleration will be deadly for the crew except if we start using special technology such as G damping as UFO are supposed to have and which probably work by forcing the ship to be its own relative gravitational mass and which make every acceleration only relative to himself, so accelerating fast near a massive object is then easy, but if they had this level of technology, they will simply be able to send a unmanned ship there in a short time anyway... But anyway this movie for a lot of reasons is shitty, and for a scientific standpoint HOW THE HELL CAN THE SUN BE DYING ? And HOW a nuclear bomb can fix it ? This movie might have caused heart attack in the scientific community... Just a plot for stupid ass people and have no idea of how those things work and are brainwashed with the stupid Hollywood idea of blowing things up to fix them, not surprising US citizen agree with their crazy/stupid/blood thirty dictators to bomb other nations to help them... The sun can't just die, he is not powered by a chemical but by gravitational effect, plus when his fusion occur, the light can make up to a millions of year to get out of the extreme plasma inside, so even if we could "fix it" we will need a millions of years to see the differences, and if a giant explosion was enough, we could simply crash a giant ass asteroid on it at a really high speed. It's like movie plot where the Earth core "stop" while in reality he is mostly a huge hot iron core so hot that he had not yet cooldown since the creation of the Earth, a simple dam if not using smart way to cool the cement can make more than 100 years to cooldown, so billions of years for something the size of Mars is not that surprising... People thinks we could stop or restart the sun or that the Earth's core is a giant nuclear reactor, both are false, there is nuclear activity in the Earth's core but this is not the reason of its heat, it is partially (apparently half) but not the only reason and if all nuclear matter are depleted at once on the core, the planet won't suffer from that before millions of years and it will be really slow... The sun is even less able to be perturbed, we could crash the entire solar system inside it without noticing any change, the sun make up 99% of the mass of the entire solar system, so a small 1% won't do much, and the Earth is even smaller, so all fissionable material that human can scoop and this exclude everything bellow 10/15Km deep, is NOTHING for the sun, there is literally tons of asteroid that his the Sun and contain fissionable materials, more than we imagine, I don't know how many per years, but probably a lot, and the sun don't even care about it... THAT is the problem of the movie, the whole main plot element is so fictional that it require no understanding of the real phenomena to be believed...
Note that it is technically possible to do the intuitive thing and just point the rocket at the sun from earth and go directly towards it, but this is the least efficient thing to do by far as you need to be going so fast that the sideways component of your velocity isn’t enough to cause you to miss. With current rocket technology this is extremely impossible. I am not sure exactly how impossible because I am only a freshman physics major but I’d love to see a minute physics video on it :)
In that situation you have to travel the distance to the Sun in less time than it takes your sideways velocity to move you far enough to miss the Sun. It's pretty simple math.
I appreciate your comment so much, I got here from a kurzgesagt video and it kept bugging me so much because they all act on the misconception that the only way touch sun is to fall into it. but the example of that probe shouldn't apply to nuclear waste because they didn't want to slam their probe into the solar system night light. But rather orbit it. [I know this comment is 2 years old but still, thank you] [I'm also not saying we should shoot NW into space or anything]
@@sweypheonix yw :) also yes even if pointing directly at the sun and just slamming into it is effectively impossible, or impractical because it would take way more fuel than falling into it would, they shouldn’t act like it is actually impossible.
I really hate to have to nitpick this, so I apologise in advance. Due to its MASSIVE magnetic field and how plasma is just another state of matter.. it wouldn't be hard, but there would be a hell of a lot of resistance. And to component particles, pretty falls into the same category of "pls no do not want the burns".
So will an object floating in space keep it's initial velocity after leaving the earth, or will it diminish? If you sent a rocket from the earth to Pluto, wouldn't you still have to counter your initial velocity, that would be perpendicular to the path from inner to outer solar system? What would cause that to reduce from 30 m/s to 6 m/s?
I don't think you'll get anywhere on the solar system going at 30 meters per second my dude And your comment is so convoluted i didn't understand anything else '-'
Two things: 1) Why would you need to stop all angular momentum in order to hit the sun? We don't have to do that to hit Earth from orbit. You only have to slow down enough for the orbital path touch the surface of the far side of the stellar body (or enter the atmosphere if it has a thick enough one). The only time you (may) need to worry about killing all angular momentum is if you're trying to land safely, which is completely unnecessary when throwing trash at the sun. 2) We wouldn't need to hit the sun anyway. Any waste carrying rocket we sent to the sun would burn up before it ever hit the surface. You only need to get it close enough.
+DannyVT I agree. Science is a matter of determining facts. Religion is one's own interpretation of the facts. Very personal and irrelevant to the science itself.
Start by rotating the rocket so that it is 'tidally locked' with the sun, even though it's just rotating at 365.2422 rpy (rotations per year) and then set the boosters at the orbital perihelion, sounds good in theory, might work in practice
The orbital mechanics to get close enough would still be the same. You would either have to decelerate or fly by Venus multiple times over a period of months to slow the crafts speed enough to then use a rocket burn to push it close enough to the Sun.
Regarding your last question: it would appear as if there is no possible night on the Sun. But there must be a speed at which the Sun is turning over its center. So if you measure "day" as what on Earth is a 24 hour period, the Sun revolves around its axis ... but it is difficult to measure because it is not as solid mass moving all at the same time. Solar spots rotate around the surface of the Sun in about 24.47 Earth days. But a spot on the polar regions take about 38 Earth days to go around a shorter distance around the axis of the Sun. And so, astronomers have decided to measure the rotation rate of the Sun from an arbitrary position of 26° from the equator; approximately the point where we see most of the sunspots. At this point, it takes 25.38 Earth days to rotate and return to the same spot in space.
Wow, I'm actually confused on why this is an issue for once. Why do we need to decelerate first? Can't we just use the momentum as a slingshot, or can't we just adjust the trajectory to accomadate the speed of earth? I figured that the "optimal angle" to fire from would be calculatable or something. I feel like the need to decelerate would be a non-issue if we fired the rocket at the exact precise time and position. I don't know anything about this though so correct me if I'm wrong.
daemonsoadfan I was talking about the day thing. And I dont care what astronomers say, its a planet. They can say dwarf planets and plutoids all they want, Pluto emotionally is a planet.
Is it not possible to burn some ratio of diagonally 'sun-down'-retrograde (for those who don't know, retrograde is pointing where you're coming from, and in terms of burns it means slowing down in relation to what you're travelling in relative to) to achieve a better orbital change? Also, for those of you who wanted to know exactly how accurate you have to be your retrograde burn, If you work out how long it takes to get from earth to the sun after an instantaneous exact retrograde burn and divide the radius of the sun by this time, this will act as a maximum 'sun-horizontal' velocity that could be acquired. I worked this out to 4 significant figures and it turns out you've got to be pretty close: if you're more than about 0.1175 m/s out then you'll just burn to a crisp and get even more radioactive. Given, we wouldn't see the waste again for years though, as it's orbital period would likely be so far out of sync that it'd miss us repeatedly. Finally, in terms of dealing with this problem and the efficiency problem, if you go 'sun up' to use less fuel, you'll quickly find that your required level of accuracy becomes much much higher. This isn't just because the sun is 'a smaller target to hit' in the sense that you'd struggle to hit it with an arrow in zero gravity even if you knew, but also because your 'sun-horizontal' velocity matters more exponentially when you're further from the sun due to the change in acceleration due to gravity - essentially to do with the inverse-squared law about gravity.
I think it does, and I think it relates to my question: The goal is to destroy the waste, right? Does it have to crash right away or would it be alright for it to orbit a bit? if you sent it straight towards the sun it should begin to spiral and eventually crash into the sun, but as becca said the waste would be destroyed, or at least melted, before it "crashed."
+Ladislav Tánczos Vapor? And also so what? That same solar wind is immeasurably more potent than the waste anyway and is adequately protected from by the magnetosphere.
Because it still exists in space, and will continue to exist (or explode). That could be bad for future space exploration projects because of the danger of crashing into the rocket, or coming into contact with nuclear waste debris. Not a great long-term solution.
It is simple: A day of the sun takes as long as the sun shines, alias: its entire life span (+ only one day on the sun would exist) According to "Reverso Wörterbuch" A Day is the time in which it is bright (translation from "Zeit, in der es hell ist") Because the sun always shines on its surface (or to be more accurate, the surface itself shines) There wouldn't be a single time period in wich there was no light -> a night. Not until the sun dies.
I dont think you have to completely make your horizontal velocity zero, as the deceleration in itself will pull you closer to the sun which will begin a spiral meaning you will eventually hit the sun
If you want to fall on the sun, you have to slow down on your orbit first. But to hit the sun, you just have to go toward the sun. Just make sure to always point your rocket toward the sun. The radial speed is not affected by the orbital speed. I don't know how much energy it would take to constantly ajust the orientation of the rocket toward the sun but maybe this is why they choose to slow down the rocket first.
That is not a very constructive comment in any shape or form. Instead of calling him dumb you should try to help and explain what he does not understand. If you cannot do that, then you should not comment at all. This is a place to help people learn about science and other fun and interesting facts, and negativity drives people away. So if you could please stop being rude and instead help understand what you understand, that would nice.
The video explains that because you have sideways motion you can never fall into the sun without eliminating that sideways motion. After having a sideways velocity of zero, you can then fall into the sun. This is explained in the video quite well actually.
But you don't have to zero your angular velocity unless you literally want to go in a direct line from the Earth to the Sun. Just start into an elliptical solar orbit, then burn at aphelion to lower perihelion into the surface of the sun. Its center of gravity is well inside so this shouldn't take anywhere near 31 km/s. Same logic as a Hohmann transfer to an outer planet, except your retrograde burn isn't to get captured by a planet but to lower the perihelion. It just takes a very long time compared to a direct transfer to the Sun but it doesn't take anything close to the same amount of delta V. Try it in KSP right now.
0:03 Aktually If it is radioacktive for "10s of thousands of years" it might not do much It's the radioaktive material wich has a short halflive that does a lot of damage since it outputs the same energie within an shorter time
No, because if you were to shoot something directly in to space from earth, I'm pretty sure that it would keep going because of inertia, sure, but it would be going diagonally, because the Earth doesn't sit at rest- it rotates the sun in its elliptical orbit. I mean, if you jump off of a speeding car, (which I hope you don't,) you wouldn't go straight, you'd go forward, yes, but you would also go to the side; you would be going diagonally. So it would probably keep going like that until it hits something besides our sun. Or, if we're at a specific part of our orbit, the object might go diagonally while we go around the sun, so it would hit earth and possibly demolish a whole country- a diagonal line next to a horizontal line isn't parallel- they would eventually hit. It might even hit our moon, causing our nights to be MUCH darker. Please keep in mind that this is just what a ten-year-old kid thinks would happen- please don't get on me for being a kid, because I'm so tired of people assuming I'm exactly like the stereotypical child and telling me "Get off the internet, stupid kid!"
Because no matter what direction you fly in you still have to negate 30 km/s by going 30 km/s in the required direction, no matter how diagonal you're going.
If you wanted to make a follow up... I've heard the term "decaying orbit" before. How much energy would it take to send a rocket into an orbit where it would crash in 100 years or something like that?
How long is a day on the sun? If you are speaking of rotation, that depends where you are looking at the sun. Because it spins faster at the equator than at the poles, a day could be 24.47 earth days, about 38 earth days, or anywhere in-between.
You don't need to stop from 30km/s to zero. You can decrease the speed lower and then the atmosphere of the Sun will further lower the speed. You can also use Mars, Venus, Mercury or Jupiter to lower the speed, as it was said in the video.
I have to take exception with "rockets have a tendency to occasionally explode while launching". The percentage of spacecraft launches which resulted in atmospheric explosions is very small compared to the number of successful launches, so it's not quite accurate to say they have a "tendency" to explode.
If even a little bit of orbital speed sideways from the radial vector, prevents something from falling into the sun, then I wonder how does the sun formed itself at the beginning? Because, most material probably would be having atleast some sideways velocity, and thus it would either gain a more elliptical orbit or leave the solar system entirely.
This is also assuming that all of your motion if from one initial burst of energy, like if you fired from a gun. If you had any kind of propulsion system which could continue to accelerate after you're already in motion, you could easily accelerate to whatever speed required by simply leaving the engines on until you're going fast enough. Granted that's still insanely fast, but still that's a definite factor that's not being taken into account
How about if we point our rocket outwards and just accelerate radially towards the sun? Our velocity tangent to the orbit would be the same if we only accelerate radially, so now we would be in a lower orbit where a higher speed is needed to avoid "falling into the sun". Then we wouldn't fall straight into the sun but come in at a very shallow angle with a lot of speed, but since we don't have to decellerate, doesn't it make sense to do it this way?
It is easy to hit the sun. Just wait for our Sun to become a Red Giant and swallow up the Earth. Like all other tasks, they key to success is patience.
hehe
well i mean your not wrong...
Wouldn't that be the sun hitting you?
but then unclear wast woudnt be dangerous for the sun to turn into a red giant it take 4 billion years to become a red giant and it take thousands of years to become"stable"
Or simply replace all the current uranium reactors with thorium-powered molten-salt reactors, and stop producing the radioactive waste.
We are using uranium because america and russia researched it because they wanted the waste to put in weapons.
How long will a day be on the sun? Well it's only a Sunday..
How long will a day be on the sun? Well, there was first the night, then there's 10 billion years of day, then there's an almost eternal night with a little light.
Well if you're on the sun when its a white dwarf it would still be insanely bright
I am disappointed in you, no videos with a name like that.
Patrick Smith wut
24 hours
2:31"But how gravity assists work is a topic for another day" WELL I'M WAITING
Exactly! No one's talking about this, but the simplest orbital assist from Earth would allow to get to the sun.
Still waiting
Still waiting
Edit: I did the math, and it is really hard. The Moon, Earth, and the inner planets don't have enough gravity *at their effective surface* to counteract Earth's initial velocity.
@@garykempen I too tired to check so have my like
"Since rockets have a tendency to occasionally explode..."
Astronauts: Wait, what?
Astronauts on Space Shuttle Columbia: *Why do I hear boss music?*
Columbia Space Shuttle Rocket Tank Boosters: Time for me to go boom boom like a firework boom boom! *Explodes*
@@centauria9122 your confusing Columbia with challenger and joking about it is disrespectful just don’t do stuff like that plus that’s inaccurate
@@adamkerman475 Dark humour is like children with cancer. Never gets old-
@@adamkerman475 didn't both of them exploded anyway
the only sad thing is that the shuttle program was terminated.
This seems quite intuitive after playing a lot of KSP.
Osmos is a cool game too with these physics
Absolutely. I was even talking to myself about gravity assist instead casually in my head before he mentioned it because of KSP xD
Well said! KSP for the win
And playing sfs
What I have always wondered in ksp is what your orbit would look like if you burned retrograde on the side of an eliptical orbit centered around the edges.
Hitting the Sun is hard
Expectation: Yea, Sun is so hot that the rocket will melt before it hits the Sun!
Reality: You can`t hit the sun because Earth is moving fast or something.
It's very fuel inefficient to go to the sun directly because it needs to cancel the movement of the earth.
Earth -> Orbit around earth is around 10km dv
Orbit around earth -> Escape solar system is about 11km dv
Orbit around earth -> Crash in sun is 30 km dv
Orbit around earth -> near Pluto -> Crash in sun is about 8km dv
Lmaoooo same
So it will melt the rocket and get rid of the toxic waste.
I knew this just from playing Kerbal Space Program. What I didn't know is that it would be easier and more fuel efficient to wait until I'm further out. Now I want to try a close fly-by of the sun on KSP.
Exactly.
Love it when I smile when something seems so counter-intuitive - "It takes less acceleration to get to other stars then to get to our own Sun".
*than
What's so hard. Fire a heat-seeking rocket; it will hit the sun no matter what direction you fire it at.
Genious
Are you listening NASA? The problem has been solved
The problem with that is that no little Missile has 30km/s of delta-v. An a missile built for use in our atmosphere would not be able to maneuver in the vacuum of space. These are just two of the things wrong with your idea.
Also 30km/s is bullshit. Whenever I look at the sun it doesn't move at all!!!
Its not about how fast the sun moves... Its about how fast WE move. Right now we are moving a 30km/s in orbit around the sun.
Since sun is not a point object, the final velocity need not be zero to crash.. the velocity components should be such that it ensures that the resultant elliptic path passes through sun..
but it looks way cooler when you fall directly into kerbol ... I mean the sun.
It's just that compared to the orbital distances, the sun is virtually a point.
+Jane Black Melting nuclear waste does not make it inert. In fact it makes it worse. Instead of a solid spent uranium, you now have liquid uranium, which is just as radioactive. Or worse yet, if it vapourizes, it then creates a radioactive cloud.
Also, if it misses the sun, it then has enough velocity to make it back to Earth's orbital position. Similar to how a comet that misses the sun continues back to where it came from. So, it could eventually strike the Earth after several orbits.
My3dviews:
What exactly do you think the Sun is?
A giant marshmallow or a giant fusion reactor? Think about it!
i minabrons Of course the sun is a fusion reactor. What is your point?
It's really hot on the sun, that's why you should go there at night!
Don't be silly, if we went there at night, the Sun wouldn't even exist. Then when daytime comes around, we'd be stuck inside it.
+Nathan Clark - Nothing Serious Considering that the Earth is flat, the Sun doesn't disappear during the night and it is only a ilussion....in fact the Sun only goes underneath the Earth.
wow
please be a troll...
Lol
As a KSP player, I confirm this. But you don't need to cancel all your orbital velocity, just enough that your periapsis will be below a certain distance from the sun.
KSP is not to scale though, irl you'd need 10 times as much energy achieving the same results iirc.
So 99.99%
+Ze Rubenator , not if you user real scale solar system.
Harrison Harris
Uch that seems way less fun.
Ze Rubenator It's pretty cool actually, because all the other numbers are corrected i.e. rockets are 10x more powerful, so there's not too much difference in gameplay.
NO. THE SUN IS A DEADLY LAZER.
Confusynq not anymore now there’s a blanket~
_(Ozone)_
you are incect
@@pedronunes3063
Bill wurtz?
The sun is a lazy deadler
I already knew all these thanks to KSP. It is amazing how many things one can learn about orbital mechanics from this game.
Same.
Same
Same
Same
Same
Anyone who plays KSP already knows this.
+
Raise your hand if you learned about the oberth effect the hard way
110% true
Orbital mechanics are much easier to learn and understand if you're the one controlling the craft, and are able to see exactly where you're going with nice big blue lines.
me
“How long would a day be on the sun?”
Yes.
correct
So stfu little dickie
in earth days or in sun days?
Listen here you little sh--
almost 720 hours on average (600 hrs at the equator, 840 hrs at poles)
how long is a day on the sun?
10 billion years
the lifespan of the sun....
But how long is a year on the sun?
;-)
+BeWater 365 earth days XD
why isnt a sunday an earth day then?
+Alex H. because they have different time frames
it takes 24 days at the equator, and 35 at the poles for one full rotation. google is friend.
Why can't we just dump all our nuclear waste at Keemstar's house?
I am pretty sure that would be fine. The toxic and radiatiin levels of that place are greater, so a lil extra wont really change it.
Off xD
Let's get RIGHTT into the NEWWWSS!!!
thats a great idea! plus theres a good chance all the waste will be sucked in by his vagina so its perfectly safe!
Actually people who understand nuclear power tend to say "Sure, you can store the nuclear power waste at my house. They pay well for that."
You need about 16.7 km/s to leave Solar System if you start from Earth surface.
11 km/s is only enough to escape Earth gravity field (you will still be in orbit around the Sun).
It is still less than 30 km/s to hit the Sun, but "Minute Physics" channel should not make such mistakes.
You sir, should be on the top.
@Romano Coombs Being a grammer nazi is stupid. But facts on the other hand need to be delivered correctly. People do memorize this stuff and then share it as if it were fact.
I think the numbers stated in the video is the velocity needed after leaving Earth's gravity potential. If you're not moving, starting from Earth's orbital radius you need 42Km/s to leave the solar system. If you accelerate in the same direction as the Earth's velocity, then you need an additional 12Km/s (close to the 11 Km/s stated in the video.)
@@maythesciencebewithyou yea better being a regular nazi
All us KSP players are like:
Ye, I already knew that.
heh...
Just use Danny2462's FTL launcher and arrive at the sun in 43 seconds!
granted if you can somehow manage to aim that thing
damn u beat me to the comment
Scott Manley knows XD
As a KSP player, I actually did not know that. This explains why my sundive ship failed. Yes, I am taking notes.
why does everyone want to send radioactive waste to space. isn't there at least a chance that this stuff will be useful in the future? and more important isn't all that fuel and the rockets and stuff just a gigantic waste of material?
You're right. Most nuclear waste is unprocessed uranium, which is still very useful. In theory, it could be reprocessed in a breeder reactor again and again until *all* the energy is extracted. But our current reactors are like burning wood and throwing away the coals before they have a chance to turn to ash or at least burn more wood.
People often over exaggerate when they talk about nuclear waste. It's often lasts not as much as people say, and there is a smaller amount than what most people imagine. Most nuclear waste is spent fuel rods, which are in small volume and used up slowly. In reality sticking them in shielded containers at some abandoned mine is a good enough of a solution.
Waste of money.
Breeder reactors can use them as fuel and get 10x more energy from them than the first time they were burned.
Depends what you mean by "most". I'm pretty sure by mass, most nuclear waste is contaminated haz mat suits and other similar items that are mildly radioactive.
Look up fast neutron reactors. We can use nuclear waste as fuel.
The problem with nuclear waste is not that we don't know what to do with it. The technology for reprocessing and recycling nuclear waste was developed decades ago. Politics and economics are the major reasons it is not done. Besides the political complications, of the potential to separate plutonium during the process, try convincing anyone a nuclear waste reprocessing facility would be good for their community.
The benefits of reprocessing are that it shortens the lifetime of the remaining waste, reduces the total volume of waste, and allows the recycling of spent nuclear fuel. The research is there, this issue has been studied in depth for years. There are so many ways to handle nuclear waste, the problem is finding one acceptable to society and getting is licenced and built.
Since Chernobyl. society has gotten rly Anti Nuclear power. Which is understandable. somethinglike chernobyl should NEVER happen again. But, politics crashed projects like the MSR and societies "Anti Nuclear" movement kinda blocks research...
Eat it
Let's dump it all into the Grand Canyon. It's like nature already dug a big hole in the middle of nowhere for us.
Two types of people
We’ve already solved the issue of nuclear waste disposal. There’s a company called Deep Isolation that drills super deep boreholes with oil drilling equipment. Twelve 18’’ boreholes drilled on site can dispose of all the nuclear waste a power plant will ever produce in its entire lifetime at depths that ensure it will never be a threat to anyone ever again.
I guess anyone that played Kerbal Space Program and tried it knows that. :)
yea heh
It came out for console :D I played it on PC tho
Thrust retrograde!
lol
Adraria8 on the apoapsis!
A day on the sun?
1. Look at a point and then wait until the sun rotates so you see it again
DONE!
Because the Sun is gaseous, different sections rotate at different speeds. At the surface, the area around the equator rotates once about every 25 days. The Sun's north and south poles rotate more slowly. It can take those areas more than 30 days to complete one rotation
+Peter Barta +
1.a: Look at a point on the sun.
Done!
1.b: Wait until the sun rotates so you see it again.
I can't see anymore.
+RebelKeithy the time it takes to rotate on the sun depends on the longitude. near the equator faster near the pole slower
Really due to fluid dynamics and magnetic fluctuations, no matter where you were on the sun, no two days would really be the same length.
This is one of your best videos Henry. It's so clear about something that's not exactly intuitive. And some of the geeky jokes below are pretty funny.
Actually, radiation from the waste from nuclear reactors they're capable of building today will drop below background levels in just 300 years, and for the ones they have on the drawing board, there'll be basically no waste at all, making nuclear power sustainable.
So many science blogs and channels I like just don't seem to want to update their info on nuclear power. Why is that?
Not to mention the total lack of traction fission is getting despite potentially having working prototypes around 2030.
You mean fusion?
Because people have been promising fusion forever, and nobody has demonstrated it being viable anytime soon. There's literally no reason to get excited.
seigeengine I think he meant fusion, yeah. But I didn't get into thorium power, which is a whole other ball of wax and one I think there is reason to get excited about, not least of which are safe waste, no chance of meltdown, and too difficult to weaponize. India is going to get online this year the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor running on thorium, and in the US there are designs for molten salt reactors that are even more impressive.
Surely nuclear power being sustainable has less to do with the waste that is produced and more to do with how long you can sustain it, hence the name. I would argue it is also sustainable under that criterion, but you do have to be specific.
seigeengine Yes I meant fusion, it's too early in the morning for me to be thinking.
accelerate to higher orbit of sun and then slow down... am i the only one, who played KSP? 😂
Nope. This has become a community gathering place already :)
KSP player here i.e. rocket 'xploder
2 hours of max time acceleration
was thinking the same... a bi-ellliptical transfer can save a lot of d/v, or a gravity assist from jupiter
lol wrote that having seen the first half of the video... now i feel dumb
"That's a topic for another day"
CGP Grey?
0:45 Glad to know the earth moves in a straight line past the sun, then teleports back like an evil Pacman game. The more you know...
I still remember reading a Roald Dahl picture book in my childhood where at the end, they somehow launched an alligator into the Sun...
You can actually demonstrate how hard pretty easily, just hold a string with a heavy object attached to one end, start spinning it around you, now, while it’s still spinning around you, pull in on the string to pull the object closer, not only will it be very difficult to pull it in as the object will pull back quite hard, it will also start spinning faster
or you can just play kerbal space program and find out :)
haha lol😂😂
lol same
The Kerbol system is 1/10 the real scale so it's really easy. If you play KSP with RSS though, ugh
+Damminh Khoi well it's still like a couple thousand m/s of Delta v, and it really illustrate the point made in this video... interactively
Oscar Horsey There must be a troll in every comment section, even in one about science.
"How long would a day be on the sun?" Hey, Vsause. Michael here...
I never considered how difficult it would be to achieve this, thank you.
the background music was really overpowering, imo
it was annoying
Yea it was cool at first, but now it overshadows the entire conversations
Ya it was just a tad too loud.
+Andrew Case still great video as always other than that small issue though.
yeah way too loud and too much bass, could feel the floor vibrating but the voice was still quiet :/
What if two suns collided? Would they simply absorb one another, like two drops of water...
or would the mixing gases cause some kind of chain reaction or stellar explosion?
Also...
Sun has more gravity... does this affect the flow of time on said sun? If so [we know it does] then by how much?
Is it significant? Does the center of the galaxy, with much more gravity, run at a slower rate of time, than the outer edge, which has much less density and gravity because its so dispersed out there?
Email this question to Randal of What If? and xkcd. He might make a What If? out of it!
I think maybe they will absorb to become much bigger and brighter, but I'm not to sure. I wonder what would happen to the planets, though? (I know not all stars have planets that revolve around them, but if the two stars that hit each other have planets that revolve around them, what would happen?) Would the planets all revolve around the bigger star in the same size, shape, etc. of their orbit? And what about the moons?
Mr. Observant I
It depends entirely on their masses. Between a range of anywhere from 3 to 20 solar masses combined, a star would supernova and collapse into a black hole. With just two suns, however, they would simply combine into one larger and brighter star.
@@danielbarner1646 The only situation in which this could happen without disturbing the planets would be if two binary stars collided. As I said, if their mass totals to less than 3 suns then they'd simply combine to be one star and the planets would continue their orbits largely unchanged because the total mass and the centre of that mass hasn't changed.
Since the orbital velocity is higher closer to the sun, couldn't we just point at the sun and boost towards it even with the 30km/s velocity from earth? Cause then once we got to say, Mercury, we'd have a sideways velocity of 30 km/s still, but now in a region where we require 48 km/s to stay orbiting the sun. And since we boosted directly at the sun the 30 km/s won't be fast enough to push us around the sun.
Even if it's not more efficient than going to the edge or using a gravity assist, wouldn't it still work? Or how much fuel would you need to be able to boost long enough to make it work?
No because we don't need 48 km/s to orbit the sun. If we just had a tiny bit of speed left, we will still fall into orbit around the sun, just a highly elliptical one.
@@PixelmanPXP we dont need 48km/s to orbit where we are, but since we're boosting directly at the sun our required velocity of 30km/s will increase. When we get to the point of mercury's orbit, we will require 48km/s to stay in orbit. And, since we launched from earth and never boosted sideways, we still only have a 30km/s velocity.
So, by boosting directly at the sun we keep that "orbital" velocity of 30 km/s. And, instead of boosting to bring this speed to 0, we boost directly at the sun so that our required velocity is far greater than 30. There 100% guaranteed is a point of "if we boost this much directly at the sun" then we will hit the sun.
What you're missing is that moving towards the Sun causes the rocket to move faster, as it's experiencing a greater gravitational attraction as it gets closer.
This doesn't work:
- I'm moving at 30km/s right now, due to being on Earth
- I fire my rocket at right angle to Earth's direction of motion, and towards the Sun
- Now that I'm closer to the Sun, my sideways speed is still 30km/s
In reality, your speed will be higher
@@TheRussell747 "if we boost this much directly at the sun, we will hit the sun"
If you can get close to the speed of light it should work. In the 8 minute journey to the sun, you'll cover a sideways distance of 30 × 8 × 60 = 14,400 km, which is less than the diameter of the Sun (~700,000 km)
THE EARTH MOVES AT 30KM PER SECOND?
HOW HAVE I NOT HATCHED THESE EGGS YET?
1:09 You need 11 km/s to escape from the gravitational pull of the earth but you need around 32 km/s to escape the gravity of the earth and the sun.
1:29 - um, no, escape velocity from the sun when you start at the earth is 42km/s escape from the earth (but still trapped in the solar system) is 11km/s
2:05
Bi-elliptical transfer! (Only part of it, though…)
It is more efficient than a Hohmann transfer if the ratio between the two orbital radii is greater than 11.94:1 or 1:11.94, depending on whether the target orbit is closer to or further away from the center/centre of mass. In the video, no deceleration burn is required because the perihelion (periapsis of an object orbiting the Sun) is negative, relative to surface level (which you cannot stand on because it is gaseous).
I suddenly have the urge to play Kerbal Space Program
This was a really good one.
I think you meant escape the Earth at 11kms/s, not the solar system.
There either are no days on the sun or it's always day on the sun. I'd have to know how a day is defined when it comes to stars. Can it even be applied to stars? Like, can a star only have days if they're a smaller star orbiting around a larger one?
asking the right questions here and im totally lost lol
A day on the sun or any star is defined by how long it takes to make one full rotation. This is more complex than it would be for a solid planet like the earth as a gaseous body like the sun rotates faster at its equator than it does at higher or lower latitudes. The sun takes 25 days to rotate at its equator and 36 days to rotate nearer its poles. If you'd like to know something you can always look it up.
Well a day means the time it takes for a celestial object to revolves once on its own axis. So if you know the speed and the circumference (assuming the object is approximately circular), you can calculate how long a day lasts on any rotating celestial objects.
lets define a "day" on a solo star as the time it would take for a point 90° from the axis of rotation to make a full rotation to its starting position
*****
The surface of the sun is a liquid? It might seem like petty detail to you, but the surface of the sun, like it's inside, is actually kinda gaseous. It's a plasma, an ionised gas, if that's of any relevance.
It's nice to see Kurzgesagt also made a video about this too
I want that gravity assist video, I'm gonna count what you said as a promise
if you shoot the rocket less than -30kms, wouldn't it just spiral towards the sun and eventually hit it, like water circling the drain?
Nope, it would 'fall around' the sun and get faster on its way there, but that additional speed would fling it back to its starting position. It would orbit around the sun in an oval
I think the trouble is that it might find a relatively stable (though maybe very eccentric for a while?) orbit. If it has even just a little velocity, it'll speed up as it approaches the sun, which will cause it to whip around instead of go in. I suppose depending on how close the approach is each time, it might lose some velocity by friction with the sun, but that would have to be awfully close (the reason orbits around the Earth decay so fast is because they start interacting with the atmosphere, which provides braking).
+OrigamiMarie Alright, that explains it. Thanks guys
***** True. But all of those bits of thrust end up adding up to (at least pretty close to) the total required -30km/s. It's just a matter of whether you execute it by going "skrreeeeeeeek! stop" or "tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . (several thousand more taps here) . . . okay now we've stopped".
+OrigamiMarie So even if you go like -29kms you would still miss the sun?
I recently tried to get to the sun in a space sim. It is extremely hard to do by just leaving earth and slowing down. That amount of fuel you need weighs so much it’s basically impossible to launch it all in one go. It’s easier to go away from the sun because you already have the forward momentum, just speed up and you can sling shot out.
You wouldn't have to go the entire 30km/s. It says so in the video, but that's just false.
Dark Star Yeah, Roche limit for one.
@@PandaA1257 Did you even know what the Roche limit is when you wrote this comment??
Without completely nullifying its orbital speed, any craft headed for the sun would end up whipping around the sun and being thrown right back out to the distance it originally came from around the orbit of Earth. Considering the Roche limit would be even worse, as it simply means the craft would break apart while passing the sun. The Roche limit doesn't mean the craft somehow magically just stops moving... -_-
You'd literally just get a shotgun spray of radioactive material and rocket parts headed right back towards Earth.
Agent Lurmey I don’t remember anything that was happening when I posted this comment, but thanks for the reply!
Why?
Why does it matter that it reaches the sun, why not just crash it into the moon
We might want to use the moon someday.
cause Nazis are already there and we don't want to disturb the wasp nest
Orbital decay might be a topic worth exploring.
What do you think causes orbits to decay?
@@stargazer7644 I should explore that topic.
@@wexer82 I'll help you out. Low Earth orbits decay because there is a small amount of air in those orbits that causes drag. That slows down objects in orbit, and causes their altitude to lower further, which increases the drag even more. That continues until the object reenters. Above about 1000 miles, there is essentially no drag at all, and those orbits will be stable nearly forever. There is also essentially no drag on orbits around the Sun, unless you're really really really close to the Sun.
@@stargazer7644 Science!
wouldnt it be easier to just send waste into empty space
They already do, debris from satellites, etc. Quite a hazard for other space vehicles.
+Trevor Best He's talking about nuclear waste sir not rocket and satellite debree. Also rockets still explode sometimes during launch.
why not turn that waste into more energy, I mean only like 2-5% of the energy in uranium and plutonium are used in a water reactor, maybe we could use the theorized liquid salt reactor (which theoretically can't melt down) it is far more efficient then our current gen reactor's.
If you send something into space, it will hit something. Maybe not today, probably not tomorrow, but at some point, it will ruin someone's day. And that is why Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space - conservation of energy and the fact that space is not "empty".
If you send it out of earth's orbit even enough to make it 1m/s different than the earth's orbit I highly doubt you'll see it ever again. Especially if there is a small tilt in the orbit compared to earth's. Either way it's a waste just put it in some cave a little concrete and lead and forget about it.
You guys really should watch the movie 'Sunshine'. This video will be very different. /s
Thas in reality
still a cool movie though
Honestly...Shitty movie where the religious fanatic Murikan are forced to incorporate a religious story into a scientific movie, tons of things could do a better scenario than a crazy Christian thinking that his words are the words of gods...
Even aliens would have been better than that, or radiation mutation that make a sort of human zombie or anything.
Example :
Coronal mass ejection toward their ship, they now loose most of their equipment, one of them was not inside a shielded area and is now slowly dying from radiations, they try their best to survive and finish their mission.
They find the other ship which had a catastrophic failure, an hydrogen tank exploded after a collision with an object (just a small rock in orbit around the sun) damaging tons of systems and killing everyone on board except one which survive but who is barely alive.
While the second crew tried to take the system of the first ship to repair their one, the survivor don't want them to do it, this ship allow him to survive and all his friend on-board were killed inside, for him this ship should not be scavenged, and while trying to stop the second team, he kill accidentally one of them, but then open his eyes and realise what he just did, help them, but this is hard, a lot of problems are still occurring on both ships and with their current state, none can get close enough to the sun without having key system surviving radiations/heat, but they don't have time anymore, because if they stop decelerating for too long they miss the sun...
They are forced to repair the rest of the ship while it cruise toward the sun, giving them really short time to fix everything, some are forced to sacrifice themselves for accomplishing the mission, and even if this is hard to watch someone die, well there is no turning back cause of the state of the "return vehicle" so they know they are all doomed, but at the end, they finish on time their mission even if it was barely done on time.
A movie that could focus on human experience, view on life and death, our reaction to someone dying even if we know we would not survive, and that we know we will die soon and there is no escape, knowing that each failure can cost the short amount of life time we've left and fighting, not for our life but for our planet, the life of everyone on Earth...
This will be a way better movie IMO... And even there I tried to stay close to the original without the religious/fanatic bullshit, but it can be really different if we want.
As a lot of Hollywood movie, mainly anime adaptation, good/great idea, shitty movie at the end.
Maybe it is, but the idea of the god loving stupid guy supposed to be a great astronaut with incredible competences to be sure that this planet saving mission won't fail is just so stupid that it waste the whole movie for me...
And well, I agree with you but there is explanations :
1) When we put money out of the equation, we can do what will be consider now with our stupid money as miracle, don't worry if an imminent extinction of everyone on Earth is going to happen, we will strangely forget those paper and take decade if not century of technological advancement in minutes.
2/3) Nuclear engine, it can also have solar sail with his huge shield on the front, or having what we call a "Bussard Ramjet" which will make sense if we are heading toward the sun and won't require us to have any fuel tanks, not even power generators, the shield could act as a giant photovoltaic panel which keep his efficiency with temperature etc etc.
There is tons of solutions that we are actually able to develop today, but money, as always...
4) We can use things like large scale laser cooling, maybe some tricks with thermal supraconductor used as heatshield by using the front shield to produce tons of energy to power a lot of laser cooling units.
5) And again those are things with no money and stupid politics limit that can be archived in a really short time, I mean finding the solution not building the things, but it will be relatively fast to make it compare to our actual money/politic limiting, stupidity based system.
During the ejection of the crew using a launch escape tower system during the failed launch attempt of Soyuz T-10-1, the crew had face acceleration up to 17g.
If we really want we can make a really high acceleration ship but we have no use for that, but fighting against 28g for a long enough time to get in a safe distance to perform a less brutal acceleration will be deadly for the crew except if we start using special technology such as G damping as UFO are supposed to have and which probably work by forcing the ship to be its own relative gravitational mass and which make every acceleration only relative to himself, so accelerating fast near a massive object is then easy, but if they had this level of technology, they will simply be able to send a unmanned ship there in a short time anyway...
But anyway this movie for a lot of reasons is shitty, and for a scientific standpoint HOW THE HELL CAN THE SUN BE DYING ?
And HOW a nuclear bomb can fix it ?
This movie might have caused heart attack in the scientific community...
Just a plot for stupid ass people and have no idea of how those things work and are brainwashed with the stupid Hollywood idea of blowing things up to fix them, not surprising US citizen agree with their crazy/stupid/blood thirty dictators to bomb other nations to help them...
The sun can't just die, he is not powered by a chemical but by gravitational effect, plus when his fusion occur, the light can make up to a millions of year to get out of the extreme plasma inside, so even if we could "fix it" we will need a millions of years to see the differences, and if a giant explosion was enough, we could simply crash a giant ass asteroid on it at a really high speed.
It's like movie plot where the Earth core "stop" while in reality he is mostly a huge hot iron core so hot that he had not yet cooldown since the creation of the Earth, a simple dam if not using smart way to cool the cement can make more than 100 years to cooldown, so billions of years for something the size of Mars is not that surprising...
People thinks we could stop or restart the sun or that the Earth's core is a giant nuclear reactor, both are false, there is nuclear activity in the Earth's core but this is not the reason of its heat, it is partially (apparently half) but not the only reason and if all nuclear matter are depleted at once on the core, the planet won't suffer from that before millions of years and it will be really slow...
The sun is even less able to be perturbed, we could crash the entire solar system inside it without noticing any change, the sun make up 99% of the mass of the entire solar system, so a small 1% won't do much, and the Earth is even smaller, so all fissionable material that human can scoop and this exclude everything bellow 10/15Km deep, is NOTHING for the sun, there is literally tons of asteroid that his the Sun and contain fissionable materials, more than we imagine, I don't know how many per years, but probably a lot, and the sun don't even care about it...
THAT is the problem of the movie, the whole main plot element is so fictional that it require no understanding of the real phenomena to be believed...
Note that it is technically possible to do the intuitive thing and just point the rocket at the sun from earth and go directly towards it, but this is the least efficient thing to do by far as you need to be going so fast that the sideways component of your velocity isn’t enough to cause you to miss. With current rocket technology this is extremely impossible. I am not sure exactly how impossible because I am only a freshman physics major but I’d love to see a minute physics video on it :)
In that situation you have to travel the distance to the Sun in less time than it takes your sideways velocity to move you far enough to miss the Sun. It's pretty simple math.
I appreciate your comment so much, I got here from a kurzgesagt video and it kept bugging me so much because they all act on the misconception that the only way touch sun is to fall into it. but the example of that probe shouldn't apply to nuclear waste because they didn't want to slam their probe into the solar system night light. But rather orbit it.
[I know this comment is 2 years old but still, thank you]
[I'm also not saying we should shoot NW into space or anything]
@@sweypheonix yw :) also yes even if pointing directly at the sun and just slamming into it is effectively impossible, or impractical because it would take way more fuel than falling into it would, they shouldn’t act like it is actually impossible.
Hitting the Sun isn't hard. It's made of plasma not solid matter.
;P
I really hate to have to nitpick this, so I apologise in advance. Due to its MASSIVE magnetic field and how plasma is just another state of matter.. it wouldn't be hard, but there would be a hell of a lot of resistance. And to component particles, pretty falls into the same category of "pls no do not want the burns".
LLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL
Also wouldn't the sun burn up the rocket if it gets too close
And if it's plasma then in one sense it's not even there and it's just a cluster of lost gasses in a group of 16,494,918
+John Smith Once we figure out how to get there, that would be the next problem.
So will an object floating in space keep it's initial velocity after leaving the earth, or will it diminish? If you sent a rocket from the earth to Pluto, wouldn't you still have to counter your initial velocity, that would be perpendicular to the path from inner to outer solar system? What would cause that to reduce from 30 m/s to 6 m/s?
I don't think you'll get anywhere on the solar system going at 30 meters per second my dude
And your comment is so convoluted i didn't understand anything else '-'
Two things:
1) Why would you need to stop all angular momentum in order to hit the sun? We don't have to do that to hit Earth from orbit. You only have to slow down enough for the orbital path touch the surface of the far side of the stellar body (or enter the atmosphere if it has a thick enough one). The only time you (may) need to worry about killing all angular momentum is if you're trying to land safely, which is completely unnecessary when throwing trash at the sun.
2) We wouldn't need to hit the sun anyway. Any waste carrying rocket we sent to the sun would burn up before it ever hit the surface. You only need to get it close enough.
science has an ironic sense of humour
God*
+nimbuzz Science*
Keep religion out of it -Christian
+DannyVT I agree. Science is a matter of determining facts. Religion is one's own interpretation of the facts. Very personal and irrelevant to the science itself.
Dude c'mon it's easy you don't need rockets, just use cannon and shoot smth at sun, easy
YOu don't listen
Start by rotating the rocket so that it is 'tidally locked' with the sun, even though it's just rotating at 365.2422 rpy (rotations per year) and then set the boosters at the orbital perihelion, sounds good in theory, might work in practice
AGAIN, Please lower the volume of the background music!!! The last few videos have been almost unbearable. Makes it hard to hear what you're saying.
It's unBEA-
Oh, I see you have already made that pun. Well played sir.
*tips hat*
For me it's ok.
+Zack Shearer
wut?
not everything is a pun mi lord
If the music gets louder, you're getting older
surely anything just incinerates if it goes even remotely close to the sun, you wouldn't have to hit it directly
+Hafer Flocken It might get dispersed, but it wouldn't really come back to Earth in any meaningful capacity.
The orbital mechanics to get close enough would still be the same. You would either have to decelerate or fly by Venus multiple times over a period of months to slow the crafts speed enough to then use a rocket burn to push it close enough to the Sun.
that brings up a simpler solution, why not send it to Venus?
Diamond Miner Animaniac Why send it anywhere instead of just keeping it and using it?
seigeengine what are we gonna use nuclear waste for
Regarding your last question: it would appear as if there is no possible night on the Sun. But there must be a speed at which the Sun is turning over its center. So if you measure "day" as what on Earth is a 24 hour period, the Sun revolves around its axis ... but it is difficult to measure because it is not as solid mass moving all at the same time. Solar spots rotate around the surface of the Sun in about 24.47 Earth days. But a spot on the polar regions take about 38 Earth days to go around a shorter distance around the axis of the Sun.
And so, astronomers have decided to measure the rotation rate of the Sun from an arbitrary position of 26° from the equator; approximately the point where we see most of the sunspots. At this point, it takes 25.38 Earth days to rotate and return to the same spot in space.
They say there is a rare Pokemom inside the Sun who's going??
*pokemon
ME
Don't tell any pokemon players that, otherwise we'll see a ton of people riding their bikes/driving right into the sun mindlessly.
+Murr ouch, I have more brain cells than that, thx :p
Murasaki No Kami ;p
How long would a day be on the sun?
=Vsauce! We need you!
Wow, I'm actually confused on why this is an issue for once. Why do we need to decelerate first? Can't we just use the momentum as a slingshot, or can't we just adjust the trajectory to accomadate the speed of earth? I figured that the "optimal angle" to fire from would be calculatable or something. I feel like the need to decelerate would be a non-issue if we fired the rocket at the exact precise time and position. I don't know anything about this though so correct me if I'm wrong.
can't you just fly straight up and turn left?
you would have to turn and accelerate at 30km a second. the rocket would have to be going really slow before you could start it though.
But there's a police box cheking for speed limits.
how long is a day on the sun? 24 hours, considering a day is only what humans decided it was.
Vsauce did a cool video on it XD
no a day on pluto is different than a day on the earth for example
(yeah i know, pluto is not a planet anymore... we loved you pluto)
daemonsoadfan Well yea, technically,,,
Duridian Wolff
a dwarf one
daemonsoadfan I was talking about the day thing. And I dont care what astronomers say, its a planet. They can say dwarf planets and plutoids all they want, Pluto emotionally is a planet.
Duridian Wolff
Is it not possible to burn some ratio of diagonally 'sun-down'-retrograde (for those who don't know, retrograde is pointing where you're coming from, and in terms of burns it means slowing down in relation to what you're travelling in relative to) to achieve a better orbital change?
Also, for those of you who wanted to know exactly how accurate you have to be your retrograde burn, If you work out how long it takes to get from earth to the sun after an instantaneous exact retrograde burn and divide the radius of the sun by this time, this will act as a maximum 'sun-horizontal' velocity that could be acquired.
I worked this out to 4 significant figures and it turns out you've got to be pretty close: if you're more than about 0.1175 m/s out then you'll just burn to a crisp and get even more radioactive. Given, we wouldn't see the waste again for years though, as it's orbital period would likely be so far out of sync that it'd miss us repeatedly.
Finally, in terms of dealing with this problem and the efficiency problem, if you go 'sun up' to use less fuel, you'll quickly find that your required level of accuracy becomes much much higher. This isn't just because the sun is 'a smaller target to hit' in the sense that you'd struggle to hit it with an arrow in zero gravity even if you knew, but also because your 'sun-horizontal' velocity matters more exponentially when you're further from the sun due to the change in acceleration due to gravity - essentially to do with the inverse-squared law about gravity.
30kms = mach 87
108,000 km/h oh my
Exactly. Humanity took literally two millennia to fly at speeds above mach 1
Nithin Srivatsa No, it took millenia to make the Brazil, with Brazil Santos Dumont came with the plane, and from this was relativly easy to get Mach1
but wouldn't the rocket melt long before it gets to the sun ? lol
Does it matter?
I think it does, and I think it relates to my question: The goal is to destroy the waste, right? Does it have to crash right away or would it be alright for it to orbit a bit? if you sent it straight towards the sun it should begin to spiral and eventually crash into the sun, but as becca said the waste would be destroyed, or at least melted, before it "crashed."
i bet it would. and the vapor would come back to earth with the solar wind.
Or, a mixture of light and heavy metals would be flung back at the earth....
+Ladislav Tánczos Vapor? And also so what? That same solar wind is immeasurably more potent than the waste anyway and is adequately protected from by the magnetosphere.
thank you KSP for teaching me all this better than years of school did.
One day on the sun. Wait a second, do we even know if the sun spins?
Sun spins but very slowly. The problem is we determine a day by the rising and setting of sun .
Spinning doesn't matter everytime its day bcz u r on the sun😑
Why not just send the waste out of the solar system?
Because rockets have a tendency to explode. The risk is too great.
Still got the problem of rockets exploding
no, it's not.
Because it still exists in space, and will continue to exist (or explode). That could be bad for future space exploration projects because of the danger of crashing into the rocket, or coming into contact with nuclear waste debris.
Not a great long-term solution.
i don't think you understand how big space is
It is simple:
A day of the sun takes as long as the sun shines, alias: its entire life span
(+ only one day on the sun would exist)
According to "Reverso Wörterbuch"
A Day is the time in which it is bright
(translation from "Zeit, in der es hell ist")
Because the sun always shines on its surface (or to be more accurate, the surface itself shines)
There wouldn't be a single time period in wich there was no light -> a night.
Not until the sun dies.
Can't we just eat the nuclear waste?
+Angela Perkins Yes, great idea. Just put all of the nuclear waste into hotdogs, since it would probably be safer than what's in there now. LOL
always wanted a third arm.
This comment made my day.
Imagine a restaurant serving
Soup of the Day: Nuclear Soup
There is not enough radaway for this.
Waaaaait, you don't need to slow down 30 km/s. You just need to adjust your orbit so that it comes close enough to our sun. Right?
Which requires you to slowdown almost the same amount.
*Opening Kerbal Space Program*
Adjusting your orbit requires exactly that, i fear.
Well, based on ksp facts you save about 20% of all of your delta-v :P
That's still 24 Kilometers of decelleration!
I dont think you have to completely make your horizontal velocity zero, as the deceleration in itself will pull you closer to the sun which will begin a spiral meaning you will eventually hit the sun
Your velocity has to be low enough that your perihelion is lower than the surface of the Sun.
Can't we send necular waste into the space instead?
If you pay for it, sure.
No, because of that other reason he mentioned. Rockets explode sometimes.
or just poop in a jar.
Huh?
If you want to fall on the sun, you have to slow down on your orbit first. But to hit the sun, you just have to go toward the sun. Just make sure to always point your rocket toward the sun. The radial speed is not affected by the orbital speed. I don't know how much energy it would take to constantly ajust the orientation of the rocket toward the sun but maybe this is why they choose to slow down the rocket first.
Who else watches these videos for fun but ends up understanding nothing but the end
LoL, U dumb?
That is not a very constructive comment in any shape or form. Instead of calling him dumb you should try to help and explain what he does not understand. If you cannot do that, then you should not comment at all. This is a place to help people learn about science and other fun and interesting facts, and negativity drives people away. So if you could please stop being rude and instead help understand what you understand, that would nice.
+DrNoob he means he doesnt get it cuz its confusing...plus, ur hating on him...
you need to keep watching it and googling terms until you get it.
If not, you just wasted your time watching an educational video.
This is because you don't play enough Kerbal Space Program ! :D
Why don't you point the rocket at the sun directly at like noon or something
Breaking news... NASA and the Illuminati are having a fight over you. 😂😂
Harvard said they want to talk
Dab why would they tell you ??😂
hahah
did you even watch the video
As someone who played spaceflight simulator, I can confirm. Hitting the sun is really hard.
Either I'm too dumb or this video isn't very good at explaining why it's difficult to hit the sun.
I think it's a little bit of both.
Just think about why earth is not hitting the sun....
The video is bad at explaining. They never said why you have to zero your angular velocity, that's the tricky bit.
The video explains that because you have sideways motion you can never fall into the sun without eliminating that sideways motion. After having a sideways velocity of zero, you can then fall into the sun. This is explained in the video quite well actually.
But you don't have to zero your angular velocity unless you literally want to go in a direct line from the Earth to the Sun. Just start into an elliptical solar orbit, then burn at aphelion to lower perihelion into the surface of the sun. Its center of gravity is well inside so this shouldn't take anywhere near 31 km/s. Same logic as a Hohmann transfer to an outer planet, except your retrograde burn isn't to get captured by a planet but to lower the perihelion. It just takes a very long time compared to a direct transfer to the Sun but it doesn't take anything close to the same amount of delta V.
Try it in KSP right now.
Sam M. How much delta-V does that require relative to orbital velocity around the sun?
30Km/s is speed, 30km/s^2 is acceleration. peace out.
0:03 Aktually
If it is radioacktive for "10s of thousands of years" it might not do much
It's the radioaktive material wich has a short halflive that does a lot of damage since it outputs the same energie within an shorter time
or you could aim it directly at the sun.
No, because if you were to shoot something directly in to space from earth, I'm pretty sure that it would keep going because of inertia, sure, but it would be going diagonally, because the Earth doesn't sit at rest- it rotates the sun in its elliptical orbit. I mean, if you jump off of a speeding car, (which I hope you don't,) you wouldn't go straight, you'd go forward, yes, but you would also go to the side; you would be going diagonally. So it would probably keep going like that until it hits something besides our sun.
Or, if we're at a specific part of our orbit, the object might go diagonally while we go around the sun, so it would hit earth and possibly demolish a whole country- a diagonal line next to a horizontal line isn't parallel- they would eventually hit. It might even hit our moon, causing our nights to be MUCH darker.
Please keep in mind that this is just what a ten-year-old kid thinks would happen- please don't get on me for being a kid, because I'm so tired of people assuming I'm exactly like the stereotypical child and telling me "Get off the internet, stupid kid!"
Daniel Barner but why not shoot it at an angle where that sideways velocity carries it into the sun while it's going straight (not pointed at the sun)
Because no matter what direction you fly in you still have to negate 30 km/s by going 30 km/s in the required direction, no matter how diagonal you're going.
If you wanted to make a follow up... I've heard the term "decaying orbit" before. How much energy would it take to send a rocket into an orbit where it would crash in 100 years or something like that?
This video, determined to get to the bottom of things, has chosen well it's musical score.
How long is a day on the sun? If you are speaking of rotation, that depends where you are looking at the sun. Because it spins faster at the equator than at the poles, a day could be 24.47 earth days, about 38 earth days, or anywhere in-between.
Hey guys, on the 0:48 there is a very ofensive phrase in the brazilian portuguese subtitles. Right after "acelerar".
You don't need to stop from 30km/s to zero. You can decrease the speed lower and then the atmosphere of the Sun will further lower the speed.
You can also use Mars, Venus, Mercury or Jupiter to lower the speed, as it was said in the video.
I have to take exception with "rockets have a tendency to occasionally explode while launching". The percentage of spacecraft launches which resulted in atmospheric explosions is very small compared to the number of successful launches, so it's not quite accurate to say they have a "tendency" to explode.
If even a little bit of orbital speed sideways from the radial vector, prevents something from falling into the sun, then I wonder how does the sun formed itself at the beginning? Because, most material probably would be having atleast some sideways velocity, and thus it would either gain a more elliptical orbit or leave the solar system entirely.
What happened to minutephysics! This video was 2 weeks ago, and no new video!
2:00, also you have to dodge planets.
Why not boost into a higher orbit (making it an eccentric ellipse) and at the aphelion eliminate your velocity?
Isn't that precisely what they said?
This is also assuming that all of your motion if from one initial burst of energy, like if you fired from a gun. If you had any kind of propulsion system which could continue to accelerate after you're already in motion, you could easily accelerate to whatever speed required by simply leaving the engines on until you're going fast enough. Granted that's still insanely fast, but still that's a definite factor that's not being taken into account
How about if we point our rocket outwards and just accelerate radially towards the sun?
Our velocity tangent to the orbit would be the same if we only accelerate radially, so now we would be in a lower orbit where a higher speed is needed to avoid "falling into the sun". Then we wouldn't fall straight into the sun but come in at a very shallow angle with a lot of speed, but since we don't have to decellerate, doesn't it make sense to do it this way?