Harnessing Time Dilation with NASA's Solar Probe Plus

02Sep 2010

Harnessing Time Dilation with NASA's Solar Probe Plus

by Craig Mayhew on Thu 2nd Sep 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

nasa   Time Dilation   Time Travel   Space Probe  


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