Re: Set the controls for the heart of the Sun
Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Fri, 22 Aug 1997 14:01:06 -0500 (CDT)
Carl Feynman wrote:
>>
>.. as long as the bomb is cooler at the surface it
>will stay cooler all the way down. So it is important to deliver it to the
>surface of the Sun in a way tha leaves it no hotter than the Sun itself.
>That means that it has to be placed rather gently on the surface of the Sun,
>rather than being dropped in at orbital velocity (200 km/sec). Forrest
>Bishop's message suggested doing this by halting an orbiting bomb in its
>orbit using a gravitational slingshot manuver. Unfortunately, this won't
>work because such manuvers are limited in their delta-v to the escape
>velocity for the bodies concerned, which for planet-size objects are only
>tens of kilometers per second.
Oops. So scrape together several Earth-size masses, and perform a
sequence of slingshots, within a few hours of each other. For an average
10 km/s, need 20 Earths. Some heating from tidal deformations.
I was imagining using mass drivers on the
>bomb to bring it suddenly to a halt by catching a bunch of mass going the
>other way in the same orbit. I'm not sure it's feasible; there's a lot of
>waste heat.
Yes, this adds integral(M*v^2/2) of energy, with M= bomb+intercepted mass,
and v= relative intercept velocity.
Forrest