Let's land on the Sun.

[eveningsky339]

Well, here's NASA's Solar Probe+...

This bad boy isn't going anywhere near the core, but you have to start somewhere.

 

[N_Molson]

Interesting, the solar panels are quite small comparatively to other spacecraft. Which seems logical, power supply isn't going to be a problem as you're heading towards (and close from) the Sun, contrary to the missions toward the outer planets which require radioactive power supply.

 

[JackJL]

Hope it fares better than Thunderbird's Solar probe

http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/thunder/ep4.html

 

[RisingFury]

Interesting, the solar panels are quite small comparatively to other spacecraft. Which seems logical, power supply isn't going to be a problem as you're heading towards (and close from) the Sun, contrary to the missions toward the outer planets which require radioactive power supply.

The primaries retract behind the shield when the probe gets close to the Sun and the secondaries take over.

 

[hribek]

The contraption can't be really large, either, because of the tidal forces, right?

 

[tori]

Hříbku, I was going to tell you that tidal forces would be insignificant, so I did all the math and boy was I wrong. :blush:

At a distance of R=2 (1 solar radius above its surface, still pretty damn far away as far as landing goes) a one-meter object (measured on the axis going trough Sun's CG) would be experiencing roughly 197 m/s² of acceleration differential. That's 20 g's pulling it apart. A one-meter tall object "sitting" on its "surface" would not only experience a freaking 27,974,250 g's of gravity, but also almost 790 g's of tidal acceleration. Thirty freaking million times the gravity here.

Insane!

 

[Fizyk]

I have bad news for you, tori You made some mistakes in the math, apparently.

On the surface of the Sun, the gravitational acceleration is 273.975 m/s^2, which is only 27.93 g's. I think you took the radius of the Sun in km instead of m, and since the gravity is proportional to 1/R^2, all your results are 1 mln times too big.

 

[N_Molson]

Seems more consistent

I think it's absolutely clear that the winner in such an arms race can only be the sun, unless your probe outgrows it in radative capability. Since the Sun is almost a perfect black body, the only possible way for the probe to do so would be having a larger surface area...

I forgot the shadow cone thing... The closer the ship is from the sun, the shorter will be the shadow cone... So a very long "tail" with a very large amount of radiators is obviously not possible :facepalm: