Hitting the Sun is HARD
Listen to "The Paradox of Choice" for free at http://www.Audible.com/minutephysics This video is about the orbital mechanics of why it's so hard to crash into the sun – the energy it takes...
==========
Nuclear waste. We’ve got a lot of it, it'll stay dangerous for tens of thousands of years,and we don't really know what to do with it. So why don't we just send it into space andcrash it into the sun?Well, first, it's really dangerous to put nuclear waste on a rocket, since rockets havea tendency to occasionally explode while launching, making any nuclear-waste-filled explodingrocket into a really big dirty bomb.But the bigger reason is that it's actually really really hard to *get* to the sun. Itmight seem like it should be easy, since the sun's gravity is always pulling us towardsit. But we're also orbiting really fast sideways around the sun, so that as we fall towardsit, we miss it.In order to crash _into_ t...
==========
Nuclear waste. We’ve got a lot of it, it'll stay dangerous for tens of thousands of years,and we don't really know what to do with it. So why don't we just send it into space andcrash it into the sun?Well, first, it's really dangerous to put nuclear waste on a rocket, since rockets havea tendency to occasionally explode while launching, making any nuclear-waste-filled explodingrocket into a really big dirty bomb.But the bigger reason is that it's actually really really hard to *get* to the sun. Itmight seem like it should be easy, since the sun's gravity is always pulling us towardsit. But we're also orbiting really fast sideways around the sun, so that as we fall towardsit, we miss it.In order to crash _into_ t...
