Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
50% Positive
Analyzed from 309 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#helium#mass#escape#velocity#size#times#rocket#need#years#earth
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 309 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-would-we-know...
except where they are noting how helium is being allowed to escape and not being captured as was previously done by the now shut down U.S. National Helium Reserve.
There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas.
TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
nearly 6x the size of earth though, good luck trying to launch a probe off that surface
NASA has a neat "exoplanet catalog" which is about to leap in size next few years with new telescopes and techniques
* https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/lhs-1140-b/
they must be able to calculate mass from orbital physics?
so you'd need a rocket 6x the size of SaturnV or whatever they are using for Artemis to escape it and most of that rocket is to lift the weight of the fuel for said rocket so it might be physically impossible to build such a creature at current level of tech
(might be yet another angle to "why no ETs" unless they are WAY more advanced)
Impossible to tell how much extra mass you need but it's exponential. Adding a unit of v_e [effective exhaust velocity] to escape velocity means you need 2.717 times as much fuel in an ideal rocket.
Earth escape velocity is 11000m/s ignoring atmosphere (which is not ignorable). If the new planet is 6x mass and 2x radius then √3 times escape velocity (about 1.73) would be about 8000m/s extra velocity which is about 3 times a random v_e which means you need about a 25 times bigger rocket. Ignoring the denser atmosphere which makes it even worse.