Hitting the Sun is HARD ─ minutephysics

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This video is about the orbital mechanics of why it’s so hard to crash into the sun – the energy it takes to get there is astoundingly high, compared with leaving the solar system.

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Music by Nathaniel Schroeder, http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder

REFERENCES

International Atomic Energy Association report on nuclear waste storage:
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publicat...

And Slate’s article on actual potential solutions to nuclear waste: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...

Info about sun dive delta v from low earth orbit
http://space.stackexchange.com/questi...

Oberth effect
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obert...
More on rocket burns
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/cas...

Sun dive probe
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...
Other plans (jupiter assists) vs repeat Venus assist:
http://solarprobe.gsfc.nasa.gov/spp_m...

Solar Probe Plus technical paper:
http://issfd.org/ISSFD_2014/ISSFD24_P...

Mercury Messenger Trajectory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESSENG...

Online calculator for orbital velocities, escape velocities, etc:
http://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1...

Effective potential (possibly with interactive mathematica notebook?):
http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfo...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effec...
https://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/p...

Equations for elliptical orbit speeds, etc:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis

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Created by Henry Reich