Uploaded September 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Look I want a mission to go to Uranus and Neptune as much as the next person, but it’s annoyingly not as simple as just yeeting a spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system, because otherwise it’ll just fly straight past the planets. That’s what Voayger 2 did in the 80s, the first and only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune. If you want to actually stop and orbit one of the ice giants to study it in the way Cassini did around Saturn, or Juno is doing around Jupiter, you’ve got to break and slow down somehow. And that’s the hard part.
For example, when Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016, it was traveling at about 165,000 miles per hour. So to slow down, Juno turned around and burnt a load of fuel to fire its engine against its direction of travel, slowing it down enough to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. So you might be thinking, well why don’t we just do that when we send a craft to Uranus and Neptune then? But the problem is that to get a spacecraft that far out in the Solar System you need a lot of fuel, and you need to accelerate it up to a huge speed, which means you need even more fuel to then slow it down when it gets to the ice giants. And the more fuel you need to break, the heavier your spacecraft gets, and the more fuel you need to launch it until the amount of fuel you need just becomes unfeasible. Not to mention that fuel is expensive.
So NASA and ESA are investigating something known as aerocapture when a spacecraft uses a planet's atmosphere to slow down. Instead of using fuel, it dips into the thick atmosphere, creating drag as all those air molecules hit the spacecraft and slow it down. Think of it like skimming a rock across a pond, but in space! But this is fraught with danger, you’ve got to hit the atmosphere at a precise angle. Too steep, and the craft burns up. Too shallow, and it bounces off back into space and doesn’t enter into orbit. If we could do this it would reduce the amount of fuel needed, allowing for more scientific instruments on the craft instead, and make a mission cheaper so that they’re more likely to be funded. So fingers crossed!
#shorts #spacetravel #space #science #physics
Look I want a mission to go to Uranus and Neptune as much as the next person, but it’s annoyingly not as simple as just yeeting a spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system, because otherwise it’ll just fly straight past the planets. That’s what Voayger 2 did in the 80s, the first and only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune. If you want to actually stop and orbit one of the ice giants to study it in the way Cassini did around Saturn, or Juno is doing around Jupiter, you’ve got to break and slow down somehow. And that’s the hard part.
For example, when Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016, it was traveling at about 165,000 miles per hour. So to slow down, Juno turned around and burnt a load of fuel to fire its engine against its direction of travel, slowing it down enough to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. So you might be thinking, well why don’t we just do that when we send a craft to Uranus and Neptune then? But the problem is that to get a spacecraft that far out in the Solar System you need a lot of fuel, and you need to accelerate it up to a huge speed, which means you need even more fuel to then slow it down when it gets to the ice giants. And the more fuel you need to break, the heavier your spacecraft gets, and the more fuel you need to launch it until the amount of fuel you need just becomes unfeasible. Not to mention that fuel is expensive.
So NASA and ESA are investigating something known as aerocapture when a spacecraft uses a planet's atmosphere to slow down. Instead of using fuel, it dips into the thick atmosphere, creating drag as all those air molecules hit the spacecraft and slow it down. Think of it like skimming a rock across a pond, but in space! But this is fraught with danger, you’ve got to hit the atmosphere at a precise angle. Too steep, and the craft burns up. Too shallow, and it bounces off back into space and doesn’t enter into orbit. If we could do this it would reduce the amount of fuel needed, allowing for more scientific instruments on the craft instead, and make a mission cheaper so that they’re more likely to be funded. So fingers crossed!
#shorts #spacetravel #space #science #physics
