We are not advocates of executing people in cruel and unusual ways here on Futurism, but we have to admit we are intrigued by this astronomer’s proposal of launching bad people into the Sun.
Of course, as the associate professor of astronomy at Monash University Michael JI Brown explains: the concept “sounds easy enough,” but “may be harder than you think.” And the reasons why are fascinating — at least from a perspective of physics, rather than criminal justice.
First, the rocket carrying our hypothetical villain deserving of a dramatic demise has to be going incredibly fast to break free of Earth’s gravity — at least 11 kilometers per second, or over 25,000 miles per hour. Let’s say we have a rocket capable of that, and we point it straight at the Sun — what then?
“The results are, to be honest, disappointing,” Brown writes in a hopefully tongue-in-cheek essay for The Conversation. “We miss the Sun by almost 100 million kilometers.”
As you may have surmised, that’s because the Earth is revolving around the Sun at around 30 kilometers per second, pushing our spacecraft off-course.
“When our rocket leaves the proximity of the Earth it is traveling faster around the Sun than towards the Sun,” Brown explained. “At first the rocket gets closer to the Sun. But the motion of the rocket around the Sun and gravity results in an elliptical orbit that misses the Sun entirely.”
Our launch trajectory, then, needs to counteract Earth’s orbit, which is no small feat, either. The rocket would need to break through low Earth orbit at 32 kilometers per second, while travelling in the opposite direction of our planet’s orbit. Once the rocket breaks free from the Earth’s grasp, it enters the Sun’s domain, where it is effectively not moving at all relative to the star.
“At this point the Sun’s gravity would pull the rocket (and the villain contained therein) inexorably inward,” Brown wrote. “Given this is a journey of 150 million km, the trip would take roughly 10 weeks — plenty of time for our villain to consider their sins before fiery destruction.”
So, problem solved, right? Maybe in a future when we have much more powerful rockets, but right now, no. As Brown notes, the fastest ever spacecraft to leave Earth was NASA’s New Horizons probe which launched in 2006 and reached its first destination Pluto in 2015. It reached a top launch velocity of 16.26 kilometers per second, which is only half of what we need to execute our villain.
But Brown suggests we could use other planets like Jupiter for a gravity assist. By slingshotting around the planet’s orbit, our rocket could pick up significant speed. New Horizons did this by flying around the gas giant in 2007, speeding up by 14,000 kilometers per hour, and shortening its journey to Pluto by three years.
“We can use the same process to get our villain into the Sun. We can launch them into an orbit that takes them past the planets,” Brown concludes. “With each planetary flyby their orbit is reshaped by gravity, taking our villain onto the next flyby and moving them closer and closer to the Sun.”
More on people in alarming proximity to the Sun: Astonishing Photo Shows Man Skydiving Through Sun
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