NASA Is Still Trying to Figure Out the Sun

[–] E-werd 1 points (+1|-0)

The sun’s gravity is always tugging at everything around it, from giant planets to tiny moons, but those objects are also looping around the sun at great speeds, which keeps them from falling toward it. “To get to Mars, you only need to increase slightly your orbital speed. If you need to get to the sun, you basically have to completely slow down your current momentum,” Yanping Guo, the mission-design and navigation manager for the Parker Solar Probe, explained to me.

No existing rocket technology is powerful enough to cancel out the Earth’s motion like that, so the Parker probe is getting an assist from other planets. The spacecraft has been flying way out to Venus and looping around, trimming its orbit each time to shed some of the Earth’s momentum and bring itself closer to the center of the solar system.

This is an idea I've never really considered, but never really gets explained. You'd think you'd be able to just jump into space and stop, but you're still going to have your original momentum from your previous planet and that's a ton of momentum.

[–] ScorpioGlitch 0 points (+0|-0)

Aye. If you wanted to as perfectly still in space as you can manage to figure out, assuming you're coming from earth, you have to overcome:

Momentum from being around earth.
Momentum from being around the sun.
Momentum from being around the galaxy.
... the local cluster
and probably some other group/object we haven't figured out yet.

Of course, if you manage to do that, relatively speaking, it's gonna seem like you're zipping around really fast.

Here's something to bake your brain: If you do manage to get this holy grail of stopping ALL of your movement, how does time pass for you?

[–] E-werd 1 points (+1|-0)

Here's something to bake your brain: If you do manage to get this holy grail of stopping ALL of your movement, how does time pass for you?

I don't know, but I certainly think that the way you perceive time and the way time affects you will be two completely different things.

[–] ScorpioGlitch 1 points (+1|-0)

Well.... if time passes normal for you about yourself but faster (watching everything in fast forward) as you approach the speed of light, perhaps time would still seem normal for you but everything approaches "no time" relative if you stop moving. That is to say that, relative to someone on earth, your lifespan would approach infinitesimally short. You'd wink out of existence quickly.

I mean, that just seems to kind of makes sense to me anyways.

NASA Is Still Trying to Figure Out the Sun

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