this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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It's too bad they can't fling the probe in the opposite direction once it's done with the sun. I know it's instruments are probably tuned specifically to take measurements of various solar phenomenon from close-up and probably aren't sensitive enough to be useful for any deep space science, but it'd be cool to use that speed to launch it on an escape trajectory and see how long it takes to catch up to the Voyager probes.
PSP is travelling at 394,736mph. Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles away and travelling at about 35,000mph.
Time taken to catch up t is roughly 394736t = 15000000000 +35000t or about 4.75 years.
So like .06% of light speed?
I had a couple more zeroes when I did the math. I'm not sober though.