From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 19:01:07 MDT
POC writes
> [Anders calculates]
> > Pluto weights around 1.27e22 kg and has a velocity of 4.74 km/sec.
> > So we need a comparable amount of kinetic energy to get it to move
> > as we want. 0.5 mv^2 gives 1.43e27 J of energy. Since the
> > expression "take it for a spin" assumes that it can be done in a
> > short while, say an hour, we need 3.96e25 W of energy.
>
> Thank you for the calculation. Can you put that in conventional rocket
> terms for us laymen?
Well, for some interesting reason, such large energy
expenditures always make more sense to me in megatons
of you-know-what. (Ah, the legacies of growing up
during the cold war.)
One megaton equals 4x10^15 joules. So if we take Anders'
3.96 and divide by 3600, that comes out to approximately
10^22, so one might think of it as about one million 10
megaton H-bombs (per second, I guess).
Lee
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