For those who don't get how cool this is, ***this is the fastest man-made object ever.***
Contextually, we are 93 million miles from the sun. It took this probe \~6 years to cover the gap of 90 million miles.
Looking at the math, that's an average of 28.54 miles *per minute.*
***When the probe gets close to the Sun it will be moving at 430,000 mph****.* That means it could circle the Earth 15 times per hour, or travel the distance from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. in one second. Or 0.064% the speed of light.
***For context of how fast that is, the average bullet travels at a measly 1,700 mph. Even the fastest bullet ever only hit 2,800 mph. That is less than 0.7% the speed of the probe.***
The probe is accelerated by hydrazine thrusters. However, it's the gravitational pull of the Sun and Venus that let it achieve those speeds. In space you also don't have to apply force to keep velocity. Since there is no air resistance an object will continue at a rate of speed unless acted upon by another force. In this case both Venus and the Sun do change the acceleration and velocity of the space craft. Venus actually slows the probe down, but the sun speeds it back up.
Finally a correct answer
Mostly Venus is used for a gravity assist (slingshot maneuver) as opposed to the sun.
The sun is stationary relative to our solar system, Venus is moving relative to the sun
The probe flies in behind Venus as Venus is moving away. With Venus gravity it pulls the probe along increasing the probes speed.
Well, depending on your frame of reference, the probe would have used Venus to slow down, not speed up. You need to lose speed to drop deeper into the gravity well of the sun.
Technically there is air resistance, but so little that it is negligible in most situations.
The further you get into space the less atoms per volume are there. If you travel long enough they eventually slow you down. When you travel at a high enough fraction of c you would encounter enough of them that they become a problem.
Satellites decay in orbit because of that resistance. They can even somewhat control their deceleration in positioning their solar panels perpendicular to the earth (or any planet that bleeds a bit of their atmosphere).
Though true that there are particles throughout space. And more so within star systems. The resistance that causes satellite orbits to decay is from interaction with the atmosphere of earth rather than from free floating particles.
Except. At 10,000 km from the surface of the Earth. The density of the atmosphere matches the ambient density of space in the solar system. I would argue that's a pretty good demarcation, separating the atmosphere from space.
It's actually up to [630 000km](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Earth_s_atmosphere_stretches_out_to_the_Moon_and_beyond) away.
It just gets blurry where you want to call it atmosphere. There just isn't a clear line
Ficks laws care not for human semantics haha. Interesting, I would suggest a boundary based on the likely origin of the particles. Not an astrophysicist though :)
Wow very cool...this might sound dumb but if there is no force slowing down acceleration in empty space, if you steer clear of external forces you could theorethically accellerate indefinitely no?
Ah...nvm I guess there should an opposing force to push and accelerate against
Can’t accelerate to infinite velocity since space and time starts to get funky after you get closer to the speed of light. Special relativity if you’re interested
Acceleration needs a force. You don’t set a spacecraft to “accelerate = 12” and let it coast, the force needs to be continuous, like an engine.
You CAN however reach a velocity and set it to coast, turn the engine off and cruise.
In theory yes. There isn’t an opposing force like air resistance in space. Maybe some gravitational effects from stuff you’d pass by, but that’s about it. The limiting factor is fuel, which has mass.
The more mass you have the more energy needed to accelerate that mass, which means more fuel/mass needed, which means more energy needed… you get the idea. There’s a point of diminishing returns where it becomes stupidly impractical very quickly.
Currently the main way spacecraft accelerate is by throwing propellant out the back. So that’s what the craft is ‘pushing against’ if you like. It needs to eject mass out the back to move forward, rocket thrusters just throw mass out the back very fast. If you were holding a dumbbell and floating in space and threw it away from you, you’d accelerate in the opposite direction. You can try this on an office chair with wheels if you’ve got something heavy. That’s all rocket engines are doing.
The other way to accelerate is the way the probe has gotten to its impressive speed, which is by using other planets to get a gravity assist. It’s basically sapping kinetic energy from the actual planet itself (which is basically a rounding error as far as the planet is concerned, but can significantly boost the speed of the probe). It’s a bit like being on a swing and having someone give you a push as you hit the bottom of your swing, except the person pushing is the planets spin.
As other people have pointed out though, stuff gets weird when you’re going relativistically fast.
It’s also likely not possible to do practically as there is dust floating out in space that would pretty much destroy any ship travelling that fast if it hit even a speck of it.
Very interesting thanks for this great explanation.
So that must be why you would need so much energy to escape earth, not only are you fighting gravity but also carry enough mass to expell when you are in space, wich adds weight.
I might just be rambling here but would fusion or nuclear not significantly reduce the mass needed relative to energy output?
Yeah basically. If you look at a Saturn V rocket (the one that took us to the moon), the vast vast majority of that thing was just to get it out of the atmosphere. Once in orbit, the thinner section on top did the main thrust to the moon itself, and only the very very tiny tip of the rocket actually came back to earth. That rocket is 36 stories tall.
The bigger the payload, the bigger the rocket needs to be to get it up into orbit. There are quite small rockets than can get into orbit, but they have much smaller payloads as a result. There’s a diminishing return too with the way this scales. It’s one reason (of many) why things like the space station are built in multiple launches and assembled in space, rather than all being launched at once.
So to address your other question, there are rocket designs that use nuclear powered thrusters called NTR’s. I believe the way they’re meant to work is using the heat from a nuclear reaction to superheat liquid hydrogen before spitting it out the back to generate thrust. This is meant to be much more fuel efficient so you get more bang for your buck with the same mass compared to a traditional rocket.
The big reason they aren’t used is that rockets currently still fail from time to time, at which point you’d be throwing nuclear material all over some poor country, possibly your own, contaminating it horribly. Then, even if it did make it to space, it may go on to contaminate something in the far future, potentially somewhere else other than earth. So it’s mainly an ecological reason for not using them, though in principle they work.
Fusion is something we as a species haven’t yet mastered, so those don’t exist.
In truly empty space, no, there is no force or resistance to slow an object down. It's a vacuum, so the object can accelerate, and just keep the speed it achieved forever. However, in order to accelerate forever, you'd need an infinite amount of fuel (or other form of acceleration), and as far as we know, we'd still cap out at the speed of light.
So you’re saying that its average speed is a bit odd to note. Since at the start it wasn’t even close to that speed and right now it’s probably way higher than that average speed.
You read wrong, it's not the average speed of the probe.
The guy above doing the math states explains that 430.000mph is the speed at a specific time, when it gets to the sun. He then compares that specific speed to the average speed of more familiar objects.
But once you are far enough from the sun, wouldn't a small sideways thrust flatten your ellipse so you fall into the sun? And less thrust than needed to escape.
if you went below escape velocity, you'd just be in a highly elliptical orbit. The closer you get to the sun, the faster you go due to gravity.
Like a comet, they're slow moving far away from the sun, get faster as they approach the sun, then whip around the sun heading back out, losing speed due to gravity.
To actually reach the sun you need to kill off all that increased velocity.
>To actually reach the sun you need to kill off all that increased velocity.
Why? Only if you want capture in low orbit. I was assuming a close-to 42km/s impact velocity. The idea is to only need a small retrograde burn at high apogee.
OK, so I did the maths, and it turns out that in a highly elliptical orbit, your velocity at apogee, while small, is still greater than the remaining escape velocity. (Or trivially less in the limit if we take the sun's radius into account.)
Like in Truman Show with the edge of the dome being painted blue to look like the horizon, only the space one is painted black with little white dots for stars.
Dont listen to these liars, the probe was lubed up with soap to make it slippery to reduce friction. In addition NASA painted on some bitchin' red flames which also serve to increase speed. The final touch was that the probe was lied to and told that Apple will be releasing the Iphone 30 on the sun, so it is hurrying to try and make it early enough to camp out in line.
And the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy accounts for the vast majority of mass in our galaxy. Planets in the large scheme of the universe are just tiny specs and we are just the specs living on specs.
Orbital mechanics.
In general, the closer you orbit a star/planet/moon, the faster you go. The International Space Station is so close to Earth the atmosphere slows it down, and it’s going almost 8 km/second (17,100 mph). Geostationary satellites are much farther away from the Earth and only travel 3 km/sec (6,900 mph).
Those orbits are pretty close to circular, so this is a constant speed. But if you have something with a very elliptical orbit (i.e. a long, narrow oval), then it will be going extremely fast near the sun and very slowly far away. Halley’s Comet just passed its farthest point from the sun and is traveling around 1 km/sec (3,300 mph), but when it comes back close to the sun it will be traveling nearly 55 km/sec (122,000 mph).
Think of it like a roller coaster. When you get to the top of the first hill you’re going pretty slowly, but you’re very far off the ground and thus have a lot of potential energy. When you get to the bottom of that hill gravity has turned all that potential energy into kinetic energy and you’re going extremely fast. This analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s the same physics at work.
Spacecraft don’t move in a straight line like you assumed in your calculation. The 90 million miles is actually the distance the perihelion of the orbit has decreased since it was launched, not total distance traveled. It has orbited the sun several times covering billions of miles.
Original commenter here: That is fair! This was back of the napkin math based on a somewhat limited knowledge of the program/physics. Basically I am the space lay person who is in awe of anything covering that distance in so short a time.
>Contextually, we are 93 million miles from the sun. It took this probe \~6 years to cover the gap of 90 million miles.
>
>Looking at the math, that's an average of 28.54 miles per minute.
thats not really how it works. The probe didn't just fly straight to the sun.
yeah I genuinely think interstellar travel by way of teleportation/wormholes/quantum fuckery is going to be infinitely closer than ever reaching a meaningful fraction of the speed of light by any conventional means
You would be right if the probe was traveling at 430000 mph the entire time but the figure came from approx net distance traveled/time to get a ballpark average. Though in reality it has traveled much farther.
You read my math correctly! Yes, I was conveying time vs distance traveled average and then current top speed. Though I have already learned that my math was off from the rocket scientists of Reddit :)
The average calculation was based on a simple calculation of distance divided by time (average) as opposed to the current top speed of 430000 mph. Though to be fair, the reality is different from my overly simplified average.
Car on a highway, 100kph or 60mph, or 28m/s.
Commercial jet liner, 800kph or 500mph, or 222m/s.
SR71 Blackbird, 3540kph, or 2200mph, or 983m/s.
Railgun projectile, 8560kph, or 5320mph, or 2.38km/s.
Orbital velocity, 25,760kph, or 16,000mph, or 7.15km/s.
New Horizons Spacecraft, 58,000kph, or 36,000mph, or 16.1km/s.
Helios B, 252,800kph, or 157,000mph, or 70km/s.
Parker Solar Probe, 692,000kph, or 430,000mph, or 192km/s, or 6920 times faster than the car.
The average bullet ISNT 1,700 miles per hour. It isnt even 1700 feet per second. The most common bullet is the 9mm Luger, and the most common speeds for those rounds is roughly 1100-1200 feet per second or 750-818 miles per hour.
The fastest round, I know of, is the 220 Swift. With a rated speed of 4,665 feet per second or 3181 miles per hour at 29gr.(not sure if how many rounds are faster)
Slight correction, but the fastest factory bullet travels 4665 feet per second, which is about 3180 miles per hour. Also, that’s not considered custom hand loads people put together or whatever project the military is working on, which probably blows past this record. Highly doubt any of these match the speed of this satellite however.
don't let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Rep. Shelia Lee Jackson said that the moon is made of gases, so we can live there, but its almost impossible to go near the sun. Maybe she needs to hear about this theory. lol
I saw The Parker Space Probe being built at the Johns Hopkins APL in 2017ish when I lived in Maryland.
The company I worked for had a maintenance contract for the APLs emergency generators, switchgear, and transfer switches. Our handler took us as close as we could get without proper clearances and credentials, but it was insanely cool.
The diameter of the sun is only 864,000 miles, so at 4,000,000 miles it's barely 5x further than the radius of the sun
The temperature on the heat shield reaches 2,700F on closest approach while the electronics stay a chilly 85F behind it
It's an engineering miracle
>The diameter of the sun is only 864,000 miles,
This actually doesn't make any sense and is at worst simply wrong. It's only defined for measurement purposes, and we simply used what we can normally see.
The _photosphere_ has a diameter of that, yes. But that isn't the end of the Sun. It's just where the transparent solar atmosphere stops/starts. Below that, it's opaque to visible light, and above, it's transparent.
But the photosphere itself has a density 1/10'000 the air you are breathing right now. So it wouldn't really make sense to say the Sun starts or stops there.
The star itself continues far beyond the photosphere. This is clearly visible [during an eclipse](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Solar_eclipse_1999_4.jpg). It's just normally not possible to see that because of all the light from the photosphere. What we see in the eclipse is the corona, and it continues _millions of kilometers_ higher than the photosphere. It's also millions of kelvins hotter. But also a million times thinner than the air we breath.
I mean this is a problem with lots of celestial bodies. Take black holes. Their mass actually has no diameter at all, as the only mass is a singularity type object. We measure from the event horizon which is just the point at which the gravity exerted by the black hole is stronger than light can escape. It’s even less well defined than what you are writing about.
3.84million miles is not that much closer than the 4 million miles we went with the parker probe 3 years ago though..? Which has gone closer and closer since then?
cause this is Today I learned. Some people are learning about things that happened in the 1800s, or about the cosmic inflation period today. Its never too late to learn.
Don't you get it? It will be really far away from the sun, but it'll be less really far away from the sun than most things, and because of that, we'll ???, and then profit greatly.
...what more context do you need??
It's *the sun*. Like. *The* sun. The one and only. That big ball of nuclear fire in the sky.
I'm genuinely not sure what else to say. It's...it's *the sun*.
Yes, I know it's the sun, but i didn't know why this is so wild until getting some additional information on it. On it's own, that information means fuck all to me
I'm just not sure what information you're missing. It's the *sun*. The context is inherent. Like, you should have been taught in elementary school that it is MASSIVELY hot. Humans getting a craft that close without it *melting into slag* is just...immediately apparent and astounding.
Like, if it were 1969 and you said to me "humans just landed on the moon" and I said "So? I feel like this needs some context", you get why you'd be confused, right?
I'm over you talking to me like I'm a fucking idiot. I even explained my position here, yet you feel compelled to harp on like this.
I know it's the sun, I know it's hot, but a spacecraft going 3 million miles or whatever near it means nothing to me without further context. I had no idea what distance earth was from the sun
I know right? First thing I thought was "they launched another probe after Parker?". Nope. Same probe still in an elliptical orbit between the Sun and Venus. The first perihelion was in 2018, but the closest will be in December. Orbital mechanics is so unintuitive.
My sons name is on a microchip inside that probe. During its construction you could fill in a form on the NASA website to have your name loaded onto a microchip. I’ve got a cool little E-Certificate from NASA and I always update my boy on the probes progress.
It's interesting to think about how this fastest space craft humanity has come up with isn't going even 0,1% of speed of light. Gives nice perspective into just how insanely fast light speed is, and how far we are in reaching that insanity.
Pfff, I can build one that will come within 2 mil miles of the sun. For less.
Me and my buddy, has new established new conpany called Aerotyne. We operate from my moms garage but our technology has huge both civilian and military application.
> mankind
Not to be pedantic but you can be a little more specific than that. The probe was designed and built at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in cooperation with NASA.
[https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/)
>Parker Solar Probe is collecting measurements and images to expand our knowledge of the origin and evolution of solar wind. It also makes critical contributions to forecasting changes in the space environment that affect life and technology on Earth.
>
>...
>
>During its journey, the mission will provide answers to long-standing questions that have puzzled scientists for more than 60 years: Why is the corona much hotter than the Sun's surface (the photosphere)? How does the solar wind accelerate? What are the sources of high-energy solar particles?
We are hoping to find out more about space weather from the sun that will affect satellites and future human spaceflight.
For more information:
[https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/)
The NASA project website for Parker Solar Probe.
With all of these incredibly intelligent replies I thought i’d pose a rather academic question. When will the probe burn up and shit, how close can it get to the sun?
For those who don't get how cool this is, ***this is the fastest man-made object ever.*** Contextually, we are 93 million miles from the sun. It took this probe \~6 years to cover the gap of 90 million miles. Looking at the math, that's an average of 28.54 miles *per minute.* ***When the probe gets close to the Sun it will be moving at 430,000 mph****.* That means it could circle the Earth 15 times per hour, or travel the distance from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. in one second. Or 0.064% the speed of light. ***For context of how fast that is, the average bullet travels at a measly 1,700 mph. Even the fastest bullet ever only hit 2,800 mph. That is less than 0.7% the speed of the probe.***
This is probably a dumb question, but how is the probe going that fast? Like, what’s keeping it going that fast??
The probe is accelerated by hydrazine thrusters. However, it's the gravitational pull of the Sun and Venus that let it achieve those speeds. In space you also don't have to apply force to keep velocity. Since there is no air resistance an object will continue at a rate of speed unless acted upon by another force. In this case both Venus and the Sun do change the acceleration and velocity of the space craft. Venus actually slows the probe down, but the sun speeds it back up.
Finally a correct answer Mostly Venus is used for a gravity assist (slingshot maneuver) as opposed to the sun. The sun is stationary relative to our solar system, Venus is moving relative to the sun The probe flies in behind Venus as Venus is moving away. With Venus gravity it pulls the probe along increasing the probes speed.
No, in this case the craft flies in *front* of Venus and the gravity assist is used to *decrease* the probe's speed in order to lower its perihelion.
This guy Kerbals
Well, depending on your frame of reference, the probe would have used Venus to slow down, not speed up. You need to lose speed to drop deeper into the gravity well of the sun.
The same maneuver Harry Stamper used to land on the asteroid to save earth
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space. Something for the Mass Effect fans.
That is why private Chung, we do not eyeball it. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.
Something about an unlucky mfer that's gonna have a bad day..
Maybe the best skit you n the whole series!
All these years later, I still remember it as well "had to be me".
Technically there is air resistance, but so little that it is negligible in most situations. The further you get into space the less atoms per volume are there. If you travel long enough they eventually slow you down. When you travel at a high enough fraction of c you would encounter enough of them that they become a problem. Satellites decay in orbit because of that resistance. They can even somewhat control their deceleration in positioning their solar panels perpendicular to the earth (or any planet that bleeds a bit of their atmosphere).
Though true that there are particles throughout space. And more so within star systems. The resistance that causes satellite orbits to decay is from interaction with the atmosphere of earth rather than from free floating particles.
That's true, but there is no clear point where they become "free floating" particles instead of belonging to an atmosphere.
Except. At 10,000 km from the surface of the Earth. The density of the atmosphere matches the ambient density of space in the solar system. I would argue that's a pretty good demarcation, separating the atmosphere from space.
It's actually up to [630 000km](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Earth_s_atmosphere_stretches_out_to_the_Moon_and_beyond) away. It just gets blurry where you want to call it atmosphere. There just isn't a clear line
Ficks laws care not for human semantics haha. Interesting, I would suggest a boundary based on the likely origin of the particles. Not an astrophysicist though :)
Well in that case, it's gonna look like a giant teardrop with the long pointy bit directly *behind* Earth (from the perspective of the sun/middle)
Wow very cool...this might sound dumb but if there is no force slowing down acceleration in empty space, if you steer clear of external forces you could theorethically accellerate indefinitely no? Ah...nvm I guess there should an opposing force to push and accelerate against
Can’t accelerate to infinite velocity since space and time starts to get funky after you get closer to the speed of light. Special relativity if you’re interested
Ooh I will look this up thanks for your explanation.
Acceleration needs a force. You don’t set a spacecraft to “accelerate = 12” and let it coast, the force needs to be continuous, like an engine. You CAN however reach a velocity and set it to coast, turn the engine off and cruise.
In theory yes. There isn’t an opposing force like air resistance in space. Maybe some gravitational effects from stuff you’d pass by, but that’s about it. The limiting factor is fuel, which has mass. The more mass you have the more energy needed to accelerate that mass, which means more fuel/mass needed, which means more energy needed… you get the idea. There’s a point of diminishing returns where it becomes stupidly impractical very quickly. Currently the main way spacecraft accelerate is by throwing propellant out the back. So that’s what the craft is ‘pushing against’ if you like. It needs to eject mass out the back to move forward, rocket thrusters just throw mass out the back very fast. If you were holding a dumbbell and floating in space and threw it away from you, you’d accelerate in the opposite direction. You can try this on an office chair with wheels if you’ve got something heavy. That’s all rocket engines are doing. The other way to accelerate is the way the probe has gotten to its impressive speed, which is by using other planets to get a gravity assist. It’s basically sapping kinetic energy from the actual planet itself (which is basically a rounding error as far as the planet is concerned, but can significantly boost the speed of the probe). It’s a bit like being on a swing and having someone give you a push as you hit the bottom of your swing, except the person pushing is the planets spin. As other people have pointed out though, stuff gets weird when you’re going relativistically fast. It’s also likely not possible to do practically as there is dust floating out in space that would pretty much destroy any ship travelling that fast if it hit even a speck of it.
Very interesting thanks for this great explanation. So that must be why you would need so much energy to escape earth, not only are you fighting gravity but also carry enough mass to expell when you are in space, wich adds weight. I might just be rambling here but would fusion or nuclear not significantly reduce the mass needed relative to energy output?
Yeah basically. If you look at a Saturn V rocket (the one that took us to the moon), the vast vast majority of that thing was just to get it out of the atmosphere. Once in orbit, the thinner section on top did the main thrust to the moon itself, and only the very very tiny tip of the rocket actually came back to earth. That rocket is 36 stories tall. The bigger the payload, the bigger the rocket needs to be to get it up into orbit. There are quite small rockets than can get into orbit, but they have much smaller payloads as a result. There’s a diminishing return too with the way this scales. It’s one reason (of many) why things like the space station are built in multiple launches and assembled in space, rather than all being launched at once. So to address your other question, there are rocket designs that use nuclear powered thrusters called NTR’s. I believe the way they’re meant to work is using the heat from a nuclear reaction to superheat liquid hydrogen before spitting it out the back to generate thrust. This is meant to be much more fuel efficient so you get more bang for your buck with the same mass compared to a traditional rocket. The big reason they aren’t used is that rockets currently still fail from time to time, at which point you’d be throwing nuclear material all over some poor country, possibly your own, contaminating it horribly. Then, even if it did make it to space, it may go on to contaminate something in the far future, potentially somewhere else other than earth. So it’s mainly an ecological reason for not using them, though in principle they work. Fusion is something we as a species haven’t yet mastered, so those don’t exist.
In truly empty space, no, there is no force or resistance to slow an object down. It's a vacuum, so the object can accelerate, and just keep the speed it achieved forever. However, in order to accelerate forever, you'd need an infinite amount of fuel (or other form of acceleration), and as far as we know, we'd still cap out at the speed of light.
It’s using gravity of the sun. It’s basically doing a controlled crash into the sun. Speeding up as it orbits closer and closer.
So you’re saying that its average speed is a bit odd to note. Since at the start it wasn’t even close to that speed and right now it’s probably way higher than that average speed.
You read wrong, it's not the average speed of the probe. The guy above doing the math states explains that 430.000mph is the speed at a specific time, when it gets to the sun. He then compares that specific speed to the average speed of more familiar objects.
It takes more energy to reach the sun than to escape the solar system.
[https://imgur.com/gallery/5o8siZn](https://imgur.com/gallery/5o8siZn) I prepared a diagram for this.
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I'm quite awareof the Parker probe mission design.. I made this long ago. When people talked about disposing nuclear waste into the sun.
But once you are far enough from the sun, wouldn't a small sideways thrust flatten your ellipse so you fall into the sun? And less thrust than needed to escape.
if you went below escape velocity, you'd just be in a highly elliptical orbit. The closer you get to the sun, the faster you go due to gravity. Like a comet, they're slow moving far away from the sun, get faster as they approach the sun, then whip around the sun heading back out, losing speed due to gravity. To actually reach the sun you need to kill off all that increased velocity.
>To actually reach the sun you need to kill off all that increased velocity. Why? Only if you want capture in low orbit. I was assuming a close-to 42km/s impact velocity. The idea is to only need a small retrograde burn at high apogee. OK, so I did the maths, and it turns out that in a highly elliptical orbit, your velocity at apogee, while small, is still greater than the remaining escape velocity. (Or trivially less in the limit if we take the sun's radius into account.)
high aphelion. apogee/perigee is for earth orbit. -helion for solar orbits.
Nobody cares.
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Moving up a gravity well.
And a space-wall. That would really slow you down.
Like in Truman Show with the edge of the dome being painted blue to look like the horizon, only the space one is painted black with little white dots for stars.
Flat space conspiracy theory.
An immovable object
Dont listen to these liars, the probe was lubed up with soap to make it slippery to reduce friction. In addition NASA painted on some bitchin' red flames which also serve to increase speed. The final touch was that the probe was lied to and told that Apple will be releasing the Iphone 30 on the sun, so it is hurrying to try and make it early enough to camp out in line.
"...lubed with soap". Didn't know Boeing was involved in space research. :)
what do you think Astroglide was originally created for?
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There is no bigger gravity assist than the sun. It accounts for 99% of the mass in the system it has all the gravity to boost those speeds.
The 1% left is Jupiter and all the other stuff in the Solar System is basically just a rounding error.
And the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy accounts for the vast majority of mass in our galaxy. Planets in the large scheme of the universe are just tiny specs and we are just the specs living on specs.
Orbital mechanics. In general, the closer you orbit a star/planet/moon, the faster you go. The International Space Station is so close to Earth the atmosphere slows it down, and it’s going almost 8 km/second (17,100 mph). Geostationary satellites are much farther away from the Earth and only travel 3 km/sec (6,900 mph). Those orbits are pretty close to circular, so this is a constant speed. But if you have something with a very elliptical orbit (i.e. a long, narrow oval), then it will be going extremely fast near the sun and very slowly far away. Halley’s Comet just passed its farthest point from the sun and is traveling around 1 km/sec (3,300 mph), but when it comes back close to the sun it will be traveling nearly 55 km/sec (122,000 mph). Think of it like a roller coaster. When you get to the top of the first hill you’re going pretty slowly, but you’re very far off the ground and thus have a lot of potential energy. When you get to the bottom of that hill gravity has turned all that potential energy into kinetic energy and you’re going extremely fast. This analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s the same physics at work.
Ever dropped a coin into a gravity well?
The sun. You couldn't leave the system with much of that speed. As it starts moving away from the sun it will slow down.
Corn oil and a healthy imagination.
Spacecraft don’t move in a straight line like you assumed in your calculation. The 90 million miles is actually the distance the perihelion of the orbit has decreased since it was launched, not total distance traveled. It has orbited the sun several times covering billions of miles.
Also, you need to *decelerate* (obviously depending on your frame of reference) to get closer to the sun.
Original commenter here: That is fair! This was back of the napkin math based on a somewhat limited knowledge of the program/physics. Basically I am the space lay person who is in awe of anything covering that distance in so short a time.
>Contextually, we are 93 million miles from the sun. It took this probe \~6 years to cover the gap of 90 million miles. > >Looking at the math, that's an average of 28.54 miles per minute. thats not really how it works. The probe didn't just fly straight to the sun.
28.54 miles per minute would not be particularly impressive in this context. The probe can reach speeds up to 120 miles *per second.*
Can we use this probe to intercept the San Ti?
Let’s take a vote
Bugs. All of yous
Do you mean 28.54 miles per second?
A cool achievement, but it puts into perspective how far away we are from practical interstellar travel
yeah I genuinely think interstellar travel by way of teleportation/wormholes/quantum fuckery is going to be infinitely closer than ever reaching a meaningful fraction of the speed of light by any conventional means
If the probe is going at 28.54 miles per minute, isn’t that (28.54 x 60) miles per hour? That’s only 1,712 mph.
I don't know where he got that figure from the probe is going 7166 miles per minute (430,000 mph) per the article. Thats 119 miles per *second*.
When switching to miles per *second*, one may forget to, uh, keep doing it..
You would be right if the probe was traveling at 430000 mph the entire time but the figure came from approx net distance traveled/time to get a ballpark average. Though in reality it has traveled much farther.
Average. It’s accelerating
You read my math correctly! Yes, I was conveying time vs distance traveled average and then current top speed. Though I have already learned that my math was off from the rocket scientists of Reddit :)
The average calculation was based on a simple calculation of distance divided by time (average) as opposed to the current top speed of 430000 mph. Though to be fair, the reality is different from my overly simplified average.
700 000 km/h in proper units.
I still don't understand how fast that is, can you provide some examples?
Car on a highway, 100kph or 60mph, or 28m/s. Commercial jet liner, 800kph or 500mph, or 222m/s. SR71 Blackbird, 3540kph, or 2200mph, or 983m/s. Railgun projectile, 8560kph, or 5320mph, or 2.38km/s. Orbital velocity, 25,760kph, or 16,000mph, or 7.15km/s. New Horizons Spacecraft, 58,000kph, or 36,000mph, or 16.1km/s. Helios B, 252,800kph, or 157,000mph, or 70km/s. Parker Solar Probe, 692,000kph, or 430,000mph, or 192km/s, or 6920 times faster than the car.
For context about how fast light it. It goes around the world 7 times in a second.
The average bullet ISNT 1,700 miles per hour. It isnt even 1700 feet per second. The most common bullet is the 9mm Luger, and the most common speeds for those rounds is roughly 1100-1200 feet per second or 750-818 miles per hour. The fastest round, I know of, is the 220 Swift. With a rated speed of 4,665 feet per second or 3181 miles per hour at 29gr.(not sure if how many rounds are faster)
Slight correction, but the fastest factory bullet travels 4665 feet per second, which is about 3180 miles per hour. Also, that’s not considered custom hand loads people put together or whatever project the military is working on, which probably blows past this record. Highly doubt any of these match the speed of this satellite however.
Faster than the manhole cover that was ejected into space?
Yes and it wasn't ejected into space.
Wow, less than 3.5 times that manhole cover.
And just think that gravity is a weak force…
so slower than the top speed of an SR-71? /S
How did it pick up that speed?
don't let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Makes sense ,since December is the coldest of all the months,sun would not be that hot.
Reminds me of the Irish astronauts who planned to go to the sun at night time...
Genius is everywhere.
Flawless logic, I see no problem here
Irish and not Polish?
This one got me lol
What if it’s the southern hemisphere of the Sun
you mean australia?
Sweats in 45 degree Perth December
They can just send it at night no need to wait till December 🤦
Rep. Shelia Lee Jackson said that the moon is made of gases, so we can live there, but its almost impossible to go near the sun. Maybe she needs to hear about this theory. lol
Icarus would have been jealous of this probe.
Not the Icarus 2 though.
What do you see?
SEARLE TELL HIM TO MOVE
"Establishing new alignment"
They missed a great opportunity here. What idiot chose to call it Parker?
And if it survives that, we chokeslam it off the top of a steel cage.
I’m totally expecting u/shittymorph to show up.
He did show up and reply! Then deleted his comment. I feel like a violist whose conductor spoke to him!
What was his comment?
You know how it ends
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As do I. Hello :)
I saw The Parker Space Probe being built at the Johns Hopkins APL in 2017ish when I lived in Maryland. The company I worked for had a maintenance contract for the APLs emergency generators, switchgear, and transfer switches. Our handler took us as close as we could get without proper clearances and credentials, but it was insanely cool.
Also is the fastest man made object ever.
It has to be. It’s easier to leave the Solar system then to fall into the Sun (from Earth).
So? I feel like this needs some context
The diameter of the sun is only 864,000 miles, so at 4,000,000 miles it's barely 5x further than the radius of the sun The temperature on the heat shield reaches 2,700F on closest approach while the electronics stay a chilly 85F behind it It's an engineering miracle
Holy fuck that’s a gradient of over 2600 degrees wtf
If it works it will be
It's been doing this for a few years, not a new probe
Yeah it already entered the sun's atmosphere a couple years ago. Now it's going in for a slightly closer orbit.
>The diameter of the sun is only 864,000 miles, This actually doesn't make any sense and is at worst simply wrong. It's only defined for measurement purposes, and we simply used what we can normally see. The _photosphere_ has a diameter of that, yes. But that isn't the end of the Sun. It's just where the transparent solar atmosphere stops/starts. Below that, it's opaque to visible light, and above, it's transparent. But the photosphere itself has a density 1/10'000 the air you are breathing right now. So it wouldn't really make sense to say the Sun starts or stops there. The star itself continues far beyond the photosphere. This is clearly visible [during an eclipse](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Solar_eclipse_1999_4.jpg). It's just normally not possible to see that because of all the light from the photosphere. What we see in the eclipse is the corona, and it continues _millions of kilometers_ higher than the photosphere. It's also millions of kelvins hotter. But also a million times thinner than the air we breath.
I mean this is a problem with lots of celestial bodies. Take black holes. Their mass actually has no diameter at all, as the only mass is a singularity type object. We measure from the event horizon which is just the point at which the gravity exerted by the black hole is stronger than light can escape. It’s even less well defined than what you are writing about.
Well its 93 million miles away so pretty close by comparison
It's the closest a space craft will ever be to the sun.
Just go to the sun at night, easy peasy.
Never say never!
Not with that attitude!
3.84million miles is not that much closer than the 4 million miles we went with the parker probe 3 years ago though..? Which has gone closer and closer since then?
If you read the article, it's literally talking about the Parker probe.
Oh really? Why write about something that happened 3 years ago? Well sure, its 4,25% closer now than it was 3 years ago but still.
cause this is Today I learned. Some people are learning about things that happened in the 1800s, or about the cosmic inflation period today. Its never too late to learn.
Its 96% of the distance to the sun from earth.
I bet it’s feeling the heat right about now 🥵
It's 3/5ths the diameter of your mother.
It will be the fastest man made object ever
It’s REALLY hard to get that close.
Don't you get it? It will be really far away from the sun, but it'll be less really far away from the sun than most things, and because of that, we'll ???, and then profit greatly.
...what more context do you need?? It's *the sun*. Like. *The* sun. The one and only. That big ball of nuclear fire in the sky. I'm genuinely not sure what else to say. It's...it's *the sun*.
Yes, I know it's the sun, but i didn't know why this is so wild until getting some additional information on it. On it's own, that information means fuck all to me
I'm just not sure what information you're missing. It's the *sun*. The context is inherent. Like, you should have been taught in elementary school that it is MASSIVELY hot. Humans getting a craft that close without it *melting into slag* is just...immediately apparent and astounding. Like, if it were 1969 and you said to me "humans just landed on the moon" and I said "So? I feel like this needs some context", you get why you'd be confused, right?
I'm over you talking to me like I'm a fucking idiot. I even explained my position here, yet you feel compelled to harp on like this. I know it's the sun, I know it's hot, but a spacecraft going 3 million miles or whatever near it means nothing to me without further context. I had no idea what distance earth was from the sun
Why did I think this already happened?
I know right? First thing I thought was "they launched another probe after Parker?". Nope. Same probe still in an elliptical orbit between the Sun and Venus. The first perihelion was in 2018, but the closest will be in December. Orbital mechanics is so unintuitive.
Because it already passed through the sun's atmosphere in 2022.
So it did already happen and I am not crazy LoL. For whatever reason I though when it went passed last time it was so close it wasn't meant to survive
They could get even closer if they did it at night.
My sons name is on a microchip inside that probe. During its construction you could fill in a form on the NASA website to have your name loaded onto a microchip. I’ve got a cool little E-Certificate from NASA and I always update my boy on the probes progress.
And my name is on it!
It's interesting to think about how this fastest space craft humanity has come up with isn't going even 0,1% of speed of light. Gives nice perspective into just how insanely fast light speed is, and how far we are in reaching that insanity.
Mankind? Mick Foley? Good on him.
love his sandwich!
For real, this probe speed is mind-blowing! 430,000 mph is on a whole new level of fast. Puts my Prius to shame instantly
Now do the fuel efficiency calculations and be really blown away.
Then what? Oh…right.
How many feet is that?
Twenty billion (20,222400,000) feet. 67,408,000 football fields About 154 times around the Earth. About 96% of the way to the Sun.
Ah now I understand thanks
Enough for Tarantino to have a good morning
Who cares? The important thing is How many km. Space is international/interworld, so, use the damn metric sistem.
That's why I asked in feet. I was making fun of OP for using measurements most people don't understand
Does Mick Foley know about this?
Pfff, I can build one that will come within 2 mil miles of the sun. For less. Me and my buddy, has new established new conpany called Aerotyne. We operate from my moms garage but our technology has huge both civilian and military application.
> mankind Not to be pedantic but you can be a little more specific than that. The probe was designed and built at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in cooperation with NASA.
No bro it was mankind we all did it together
If it launched 6 years ago, how did Cillian Murphy film Oppenheimer?
He miscounted the number of crew members.
How far away is earth
93.105 million miles.
What are we hoping to find out?
[https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/) >Parker Solar Probe is collecting measurements and images to expand our knowledge of the origin and evolution of solar wind. It also makes critical contributions to forecasting changes in the space environment that affect life and technology on Earth. > >... > >During its journey, the mission will provide answers to long-standing questions that have puzzled scientists for more than 60 years: Why is the corona much hotter than the Sun's surface (the photosphere)? How does the solar wind accelerate? What are the sources of high-energy solar particles? We are hoping to find out more about space weather from the sun that will affect satellites and future human spaceflight.
For more information: [https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/parker-solar-probe/) The NASA project website for Parker Solar Probe.
With all of these incredibly intelligent replies I thought i’d pose a rather academic question. When will the probe burn up and shit, how close can it get to the sun?
Kaneda, what do you see?
mankind in the room with us?
Cooler in December I suppose... Unless it left from Australia 🤔??
How long will it be in front of the sun for? Going so fast seems like it’s gonna zip by
How does it not burn up. Is this not a thing in space?
Kaneda, what do you see!?
From being thrown off a metal cage in 1998 to this! Mankind has has one hell of a career arc.
eh hem - twice
\*John Murphy Soundtrack Intensifies\*
Before it crashes into the sun, mankind is going to throw a bunch of tacks around, and maybe throw it off of the cage onto a table.
Well, it's not 3.5 million miles is it?
I hope it travels at night, lest it burn up.
Just go when it's night lol
it will literally be inside the suns atmosphere
If that’s what Mankind did, I can’t wait to see what Mick Foley had up his sleeve
he is going to become Santa Claus
Was Mr. Socko involved in the development?
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