Pluto Express ! Question

I was wondering if you take full advantage of the Sun and propell the space ship into 2 400 000 km/t ie 665 km/s speed...and reach the velocity better known as the Pluto Express top speed..would something funny happen to a man in this speed ( consider without acceleration and hitting something )?

If he had a reasonably accurate clock I would expect he would notice a little bit of time dilation in reference to time signals from back on earth.

Astronauts flying the ISS experience measurable time dilation. About a 10th of a second slower in 3000 or so days. 0.007 seconds less than people on Earth and at an orbit 1.5 times the radius of the earth gravity and velocity cancel each other out so the time at that velocity and altitude would be the same as on earth. orbits above that altitude time starts speeding up instead of slowing down.

Monroe

Is there a change to brake from a high speed which has been propelled by the sun...say example near Jupiter..which is pretty big..or Neptunus ?

If so...what is the highest speed that possibly can a ship of 42 km/s top speed with its own power brake down.

Are you talking about aerobraking on a planetary atmosphere?

Both if possible.

I am concerned if the craft goes too fast it won't be able to brake.

Would it be easy to fly to Themis of Jupiter with right timing since the added orbital speeds of Themis and Jupiter are 30 km/s as is for earth orbit.

See I am a novice here.

I assume the curving path causes some serious need for correcting the course to reach it.

Well if you carry enough fuel you can always brake but I am assuming you are wanting to slow down without carrying much fuel that I think leaves you 3 current reasonable options

1 Gravitational braking
Which if I am correct in my thinking as the planets orbit progressively at slower orbital velocity's as you go out means Gravitational braking can only be used as a percentage of your braking needs and never all of it going from the inner to the outer solar system.

2 As James pointed aerobraking on a planetary atmosphere
For this your vehicle and passenger need to be robust enough to survive the heat and "G's" this has been used approaching Mars a few times(only unmanned so far) both successfully and unsuccessfully and the Recent Curiosity was a hybrid landing. IIRC Cassini around Saturn used shedloads of fuel to slow down so assume the materials tech available when it was launched meant they did not think aerobraking would work by itself even if it was used in addition to the fuel based braking.

3 Using a complex solar sail
IIRC both Robert L Forward and Eric Drexlar wrote papers with suggestions on how to configure a solar sail to "tack" against the solar wind unfortunately I don't have any links as I think learnt about them before the web existed(showing my age)

There are a few weird exotic physics options that might one day prove useful but mostly they are still on the drawing board and/or very early prototypes that are sufficiently ambiguous to be argued about both ways.

And on the "I assume the curving path causes some serious need for correcting the course to reach it." our current widely used metaphor for gravitational effects is that gravity bends space so Isaac's move in a straight line thing gets trumped by Albert's bent space tho you can think of energetically straight lines as actually being bent as in if you draw a straight line on a piece of paper then curve the piece of paper is the line still straight or is it bent from a 2D perspective its still straight but with 3D perspective its bent. So when you coast in a gravitational gradient you always have a curving path.

With enough planning perhaps. But your window of opportunity will be quite small and I'm not sure how long it would take to get a proper alignment. A mission like that may only be possible once in 75 to 5,000 years.

Monroe

Right therefore there must be several OBERONs for different kinda missions whenever the window opens for one...this is what my starfleet would be doing if I was in charge !

When they get the hang of it they can go finally to Triton by Neptunus or even Nix or Hydra near Pluto. They could start practissing with Moon and Phobos !

Thanks for this input. So there is never a straight Newtonian line in space ?

Well you might get close in one of the big cosmic voids as space should be a bit flatter there. And Newton did have the get out clause "unless acted on by another force" and masses bending of the space time continuum is often regarded as a force But even our sun whose velocity is about 230Kms around the big black hole in the centre of the galaxy is just going round and round in circles(OK probably more an ellipse)with a circumference of about 200K light years. But what looks like a straight line over a short distance often curves back on itself on a grander scale.

So our entire solar system is going already 230 km/s around a black hole ?!

Does that mean that if we can propel a craft to the 665 km/s speed we can add 230 km/s to it..if in comparison with whole space..it is 900 km/s...isn't that 0,003 C then ?

It is still 1400 years to the next galaxy !

Could we enhance that speed by any change ?

Well a black hole and the rest of the galaxy combined but the centre of mass is the Sagittarius A black hole which IIRC has recently been seen to have had a big dinner from the gamma ray flashes during digestion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*

Yes all the physics that work on a solar system scale work on a galactic scale as well.

Monroe

Forget Themis...these have the same speed...Prometheus and Pandora; http://www.spacescience.org/education/e ... _1page.pdf