How do you get to the heavens?
Daedalus made wings and attached them to himself and his son using wax to be able to fly. The Greek mythology tells that the son Icarus didn’t listen to his father and flew too close to the Sun. The heat melted the wax and soon he found himself flapping his bare hands.
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Such a story is laughable nowadays. First and foremost, the higher you go, the cooler it becomes. Two, if Icarus had flown higher and escaped the earth’s gravitational pull, then lack of oxygen would have killed him before high temperatures did. Which brings me to the topic at hand - Escaping the Earth’s Gravity. When we were young we always thought that going to the moon and stars was a very easy thing. You just point to the stellar bodies and take off using any airplane. On my part i was a bit dumber. I used to shine my old man’s metallic torch towards the heavens na kushangaa mbona sioni the illuminated spot on the moon. Years later, i wondered why jet fighters and airline pilot wouldn’t detour and go to the moon and come back. Of course the brain grew and now i know that a MiG 31 is the only plane with the capability of touching the stratosphere.
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Later on in high school, i learnt that to get to outer space (>100km up) you’ll need to beat the earths gravity, something which is done by achieving the ‘escape velocity’. 11.2 km per second. AGIP to Imara Daima in a second. Of course doing that is/was a big challenge. I say that because up until today, no other method is feasible except the three-stage rocket propulsion. You start with a booster, stage one separation and then capsule/shuttle/probe acceleration. Yes, i know by now you’re wondering what the pioneer of this was thinking and applied it practically.
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The ability of man is infinite, unless he does something stupid and extincts himself. If you thought that was mad rocket science, then you’re about to get more bamboozled. Slingshotting. Just like how David alizungusha slingshot na kuachilia jiwe towards Goliath, same has been applied on a worldy scale, literally. Rocket scientists discovered that if an already orbiting body is released outwards in a particular direction, in gains incredible speeds, and that’s how Voyager 1 gained its speeds to the current 17.1km/s even on its space graveyard. As it went towards Pluto, iko wazimu aliona anaweza tumia the other planets of the solar system to slingshot the probe as it went further. Mind you escape velocity vary for planets, Jupiter’s being over 60km/s!
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[COLOR=rgb(44, 130, 201)]Probes in the solar system
But the scientists who take the cake are those from Japan who calculated and released a probe to land on an asteroid. Hio hesabu sio ya pesa nane. Imagine doing the slingshot thing on earth, going in the direction of the asteroid(asteroid not in a similar trajectory), doing further slingshots using other celestial bodies, and then detouring to go around and meet the the asteroid and match its speed and make a landing, dig into the asteroid, do the necessary analysis in situ in case it doesn’t make the trip back home, detach itself and find its way back home! Saa hio sisi we are either scheming on how to scam the taxpayer/ client/ business partner or tunaimba Mexico maize, thuraku or resisting to vote for the second round using slingshots and feya. SMH!
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T[COLOR=rgb(44, 130, 201)]rajectory of trip back to earth with the samples. Note the speed variation
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