Just for fun. World's fastest vehicle.................

[earlfor]

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. In 2018, NASA launched the probe from the Earth. After launch, it skimmed the surface of the Sun and used its gravity to reach 330,000 mph.

I wonder what the stopping distance on that thing is. heh eh

[argonsagas]

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. In 2018, NASA launched the probe from the Earth. After launch, it skimmed the surface of the Sun and used its gravity to reach 330,000 mph.

I wonder what the stopping distance on that thing is. heh eh

That could be a good topic for discussion among physicists, but for us lesser folks, I suspect it might have to be calculated in terms of "THEMS"

as in

THEMS THE BRAKES

[Dogma]

So many interesting things about that mission.

It flies well within the orbit of Mercury, so you could steer into that to get it stopped. It'd probably plow up a crater quite a few meters deep, so I'm guessing stopping distance at 100m. Most cars using a similar lithobraking method probably take about a meter (measured at the cg in the operating configuration), so the probe's performance looks pretty bad until you rank the stopping distance as a percentage of top speed. The only car that could compare would be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, but it no longer has any maneuvering capability, and isn't expected to encounter anything large enough to stop it for a very long long time. If it finds a planet to collide with, it would probably have an atmosphere (either Earth or Mars), so it would probably take a few kilometers of heating after deceleration began. The roadster could conceivably find Earth's Moon, in which case stopping performance would be similar to the probe, but I don't know enough about the mechanics of crater formation to guess which would stop faster.

[trent]

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