In the spirit of making problems go off , sometimes you want to just launch a particular person / problem into the sun . So — could you ? And just how liberal would the canyon take to be ?
To be launched into the sunshine , you need to have enough energy to run Earth ’s gravity and enough vigor to overcome the Earth ’s orbital speed around the Sunday . Escaping the Earth from the surface requires 11.2 kilometers per second and falling into the Sunday command about 29 kilometers per seconds . These add together in quadrature to get 31 klick per second of full delta - v.
To launch a person with a plenty of 70 kilograms from Earth into the sun without any protective gear ( I seize you do n’t measure their survival of the fittest if you ’re launch them into the Dominicus ) , it require a minimum of energizing energy of 33.6 gigajoules , or the eq of about 8 tons of TNT . By comparison , a 16 - column inch naval gun can launch a 1,225 kilograms projectile to a speed of 762 metre per minute , giving it 359 megajoules , or the equivalent of 85 kg of TNT . You need at least about 100 times the muzzle energy of a 16 - in gun to launch a somebody into the sunshine .
The Schwerer Gustav , the most potent gun ever built , could launch a 7200 kilo rocket to a pep pill of 720 meter per second , still giving it a kinetic vim adequate to barely half a ton of TNT . The Gustav had a mass of 1350 tons while the 16 - inch throttle has a mass of 121 tons . I do n’t recognize what surmount law gun follow , but I can safely pretend that such a gun would be at least a few times as massive as the Gustav gun for hire . A mildly relevant comparison could be made with the Saturn V skyrocket , which had a fueled mass of 2300 tons .
Schwerer Gustav,16″/50 quality Mark 7 artillery , Saturn V
So now let ’s suppose we make a carom with a muzzle speed of 31 kilometer per s. What would find ? Well , if the barrel of the shank is less than 100 metre long , the quickening experienced would be on the order of 500,000 g. For a 70 kg person with a cross sectioned arena of about one square time , the stresses impose would be comparable to inter the somebody under a mountain . As a import of Newton ’s third jurisprudence , the gun experience the same force out as the person , and has to deal with those immense stresses somehow .
Once the person make it through the barrel , they ’ll be immediately greet by Earth ’s atmosphere at Mach 90 . The quickening from the resulting drag would be comparable to the speedup felt while make out out of the shank , but in the opposite instruction . The thermal loading would heat the aviation forwards of the person to tens or mayhap hundreds of thousands of Kelvin .
So , in summary , you ’ve embark on one of the largest engineering projects in chronicle and found a way to powderise and burn a human being in less than three thousanths of a second . Are you sure you still want to fly them into the sun , where the surface temperature is a bare 5800 Kelvin ? Yes ? Okay , let ’s make the launch survivable .
We could make the cannon a rails 1000 of kilometers long that gradually pitch into space , but you have to reckon that such a rail would have to curve around the worldly concern . A consistency in circular movement at 31 kilometer per second around the Earth experiences 15 g ’s of radial speedup , which would easily defeat a person .
How about a space elevator protract 36,000 kilometers above the equator ? The average vertical quickening would be about 1.5 thousand ’s , which include the force of gravity as it decreases with ALT . This is managable . Interestingly enough , because the space elevator is necessarily on the equator , it wo n’t always luff in the direction opposite the Earth ’s velocity relative to the sun . You have to hold off for the Earth ’s velocity transmitter to fleet through the vernal equinoctial point , mean that such a launch can only be performed during two periods a twelvemonth around the solstices . Otherwise , you will waste DOE travel your projectile out of the sheet of the Earth ’s orbit and you might not reach the sun .
Finally , once you ’ve overwhelm the job of keeping your payload alive until after launch , they will fall to the Sunday for about 9 calendar week ( Kepler ’s third legal philosophy , a = 0.5 au ) . Even if you provide him or her with oxygen and food to last that long , they will probably go from irradiation picture or their ballistic capsule overheating in the bit by bit deepen sunlight long before reaching the sunlight ’s photosphere .
In other words , yep , you may in spades believably launch someone into the sun . They ’ll just be dead by the time they get there .
Is it possible to build up a shank that could set up a mortal into the Sun , and how big would it have to be?originally appeared onQuora . you may follow Quora onTwitter , Facebook , andGoogle+ .
This reply has been lightly cut for grammar and lucidity .
Image : NASA
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