North Korea Successfully Lands A Man On The Sun!

[The Joker]

No, not really. But it did make me think, just what technology would we really need to make such a thing happen?

 

[Seth]

I don't think the sun has any sort of solid or liquid surface one could land on.

 

[CraptainFalcon]

That will never be possible.

 

[Big Octo]

Maybe in our dreams...

 

[Jiggly Jaws]

Anything is possible! Except landing on the sun. (At least with our current understanding of physics.)

 

[Curmudgeon]

You can't land on the surface of the sun in the same way that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon (inb4 moon landing was in a studio). It's completely gaseous. The photosphere is the closest thing to a 'surface' the sun has - and that burns at about 6000 degrees Fahrenheit (a cakewalk compared to the constantly nuclear core at 15 million degrees Kelvin). We could probably contruct something eventually to counter temperatures that high for an extended period. The problem is getting through the Corona, a 2000km-thick region that reaches temperatures of 15,000 degrees Kelvin.

Temperature isn't even the worst of it. Since the Sun is literally a self-containing ball of perpetual nuclear fire, it gives off a wee bit of fatal radiation. Once we can figure out how to withstand those two major hurdles, we're golden.

On second thought, maybe we should just build more powerful telescopes.

 

[Terminus]

Did they go at night so it would be cooler? :O

 

[Mellow Ezlo]

Did they go at night so it would be cooler? :O

I love you.

Anyway, landing on the sun is an impossibility. It is a ball of gas. That's like walking on top of oxygen. Plus, the temperatures on and around the sun are higher than any technology would be able to withstand, and I seriously doubt any technology that could stand the extreme temperatures and radiation of the sun would be able to be produced.

 

[Sheik]

It's obviously impossible today, and it will be impossible tomorrow. But humanity has a way of surprising me, so I suppose in several hundred thousand years where humans and technology have advanced far beyond our current comprehension, then... maybe.


...but today it's still impossible.

 

[Shadsie]

In the year 3012 - 3013, the crew of the Planet Express landed on the sun. Of course, by then, there are also plasma-miners on the sun, or an alien civilization resembling the Aztecs, depending upon whether you are watching that episode in which Bender becomes a firefighter or the "Lost Adventure" spliced together from the Futurama videogame.

If Futurama is a documentary of the future, we will land on the sun and conquer it. Also, robots secretly want to become folk singers and I might see you again someday as a head in a jar.

 

[Sir Quaffler]

It's an impossibility now, what with it being a gigantic ball of nuclear fire. But hey, in a couple billion years it'll fizzle out into a white dwarf, and THEN we're set to walk on it!

 

[Terminus]

It's an impossibility now, what with it being a gigantic ball of nuclear fire. But hey, in a couple billion years it'll fizzle out into a white dwarf, and THEN we're set to walk on it!

Your best bet would actually be a Supergiant star that collapsed into a Neutron star. Solid Neutronium, the densest material currently known of. You could walk on that. Then get crushed into a puddle of superdense matter withing seconds.

 

[Salem]

I believe they tried to send a Baboon to the sun once....

 

[The Joker]

I just found this intereting article about landing on the sun:

After browsing for several minutes on the q&a section of hubpages, I ran across this particularly interesting question that I've actually heard quite commonly at school. Is it possible to land on the sun? In this assessment of the question, I will use both facts and deduction to analyze about the possibilities of doing a solar landing.

Lets see....the sun is about 5800 degrees fahrenheit, meaning about 16 times hotter than a boining cup of water. Our sun is actually a little cooler then others starts, however, so that helps us out a bit. It looks like a big concern at this point is whether we have any material that can put up with 5800 degrees f. of heat. Pyrolytic graphite is currently the most heat resistant material known to man and can stand about 5500 degrees f. of heat, so it comes pretty close. In the next fifty years, I could see scientists creating a material that can withstand an even higher amoung of heat so this is actually looking fairly promising so far.

Ok, so the sun is reeeeeaaaaallly far away...about 93 million miles away. Light traveling from the sun even takes eight minutes to get to us here on Earth. The top speed of shuttles currently just misses 18,000 miles an hour. It would take, going top speed only, 5166.66 hours to get to the sun with our current shuttle technology (actually a little longer because acceleration times and actual speed of the shuttle). This translates into around 215 days to reach the sun. What does it take, three days to reach the moon? Imagine being in a space shuttle for seven months! Once again, for the time, it could be possible...

Heres a few things we have to worry about, however. The amount of fuel it would take to get a space shuttle to the sun and back would be phemoninal first off. Food and water are an issue in that time range. And, of course, we still don't really have the materials we'd need to land on the sun. Oh, on a side note, its a flaming ball of gas! I think that the heat and energy radiating of the surface of the sun would provide resistance to forces so at some level we could calculate the surface at which the sun would provide the right amount of force to support a space shuttle landing on it.

All I know is that it would be flippin sweet to send astronaughts to the sun, but I think we need to concentrate planets that actually have a surface first. There isn't really much of a point in landing on the sun with the technology that we have in todays day and age, for studying and economic pursuits, mind you. Landing on the sun sure would be something...

http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Landing-on-Sun---Is-it-possible_

 

[thegreenrobby]

Well, my understanding of physics is... elementary (ba-dum, TISH!) but I guess it could be possible.
You would have to be able to create a platform that could float on the gas of the sun. I don't think that's possible, considering we have yet to find a substance lighter than hydrogen.