Article if you’d rather read about it.
A common joke is “just launch X into the sun and be done with it”. Turns out, that’s actually a really difficult thing to do.
From Earth, we would have to accelerate a spacecraft to 33 m/s in the opposite direction of our orbit in order to get it to fall into the sun (without entering an elliptical orbit) For reference, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system.
This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Or you just let it be elliptical for a while and that shit will burn up before very long.
You don’t need to hit the center of the sun to be incinerated by it.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You occasionally hear of houses being hit by fragments of deorbited space stations or things like that. I’m wondering how much of our trash would survive a gentle reentry.
And also how bad spreading its aerosolized forms across hundreds of miles would be in the long run.