Landing On The Sun - Is It Possible?
No, no, no...a thousand times no. The sun is like, well, hot...as in really hot. You will probably melt way before you reach the sun, and.... Put it this way. Have you ever been out in the sun on a really hot day? Bet you were sweating buckets. And we are 93,000,000 miles away from the sun.
And who would want to land on the sun? There are other perfectly good planets to land on. And our moon haven't been visited for some time now. And if you really want to try landing on the Sun, try landing on Venus first. It has a mean surface temperature of over 460 degree C, which is a good warm up, and it has a nice rocky surface to land on.
Okay, that was the obvious answer. But if we ignore the obvious and really consider the possibility, what would we find?
When we think of landing on something, we think of something like a spaceship or an airplane landing on a solid surface. But think of a seaplane. It doesn't need a solid surface. The ocean's surface will do just fine.
It's just a matter of simple physics. To get an object to land on another, the landing object just has to be less dense than the object landed on.
Which means that it is possible to land on air. Drop a balloon from space. It will fall towards the Earth and at some point, it will stop falling. It would have "landed".
Do the same on the Sun, and you would have landed a balloon on the Sun!
The balloon would have to be made of tantalum hafnium carbide, which is the material with the highest melting point at 4215 degrees Centigrade, or 7619 degrees Fahrenheit. You will have to drop the balloon about 500km above the surface of the Sun, where the temperature is a cool 4000 Kelvin or 4273 degree C. It is still about 50 degrees above the melting point of the balloon, so don't forget to pray when you release the balloon. :)
But how you are going to get the balloon through the corona, which has a temperature of several million Kelvins, to drop your balloon is the subject of another hub.
