Icharus question

[Lar-E]

Just out of idle curiosity... how close can one fly to the sun without, er, dying?

[capi3101]

Quoth the wiki: "It is currently possible for a craft to approach to roughly 1300 meters altitude before it explodes due to overheating. No known way of landing on Kerbol exists. "

Good luck getting there, though; it takes a lot of delta-V to approach Kerbol. Best I've ever done is to put a probe into synchronous orbit.

[TheDarkStar]

Quoth the wiki: "It is currently possible for a craft to approach to roughly 1300 meters altitude before it explodes due to overheating. No known way of landing on Kerbol exists. "

Good luck getting there, though; it takes a lot of delta-V to approach Kerbol. Best I've ever done is to put a probe into synchronous orbit.

It's actually easy to do if you use a bi-elliptic transfer. You have to raise your apoapsis up really high and then lower your periapsis a lot. This can probably save you about 10km/s.

[wasmic]

It's actually easy to do if you use a bi-elliptic transfer. You have to raise your apoapsis up really high and then lower your periapsis a lot. This can probably save you about 10km/s.

That depends. If you want to do a sun-dive, you're better off with the bi-elliptic transfer. If you're going for lowest circular orbit, you should use a standard hohmann transfer (with as many gravity assits as possible).