Harnessing Time Dilation with NASA’s Solar Probe Plus
by Craig Mayhew on Sep.02, 2010, under Astrothoughts
Yeaa! NASA has put together a mission to fly a space probe into the atmosphere of the sun in 2022. Well, it will actually be orbiting the sun and so won’t just go hurtling into it. It will orbit at over 200km/s at a distance of 7 million km from the sun. It’s protection will be in the form of a heat shield that will prevent the 2000 degree heat from damaging the prob.
Time dilation over a 100 year period at 200km/s, you gain:
702 seconds.
You may also have noticed this is twice as close as I thought possible in my previous post on time dilation.
Sources:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/02sep_spp/
http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/funFacts.php
September 9th, 2010 on 5:09 pm
Funny, I was just yesterday pondering the speed of our orbit around the galactic center and its impact on time. Our solar system apparently orbits at speed of 220 km/s. It’d be a nicely complicated bit of math to figure out our relative actual speed accounting for the parts of the orbit which negate some of the forward speed.