I’ll bet you one upvote, and I’ll pay it right now!
I’ll bet you one upvote, and I’ll pay it right now!
Seeing an annular eclipse is an excellent application of orbital mechanics! Enjoy!
Drop a ball. It goes fastest just before and after it hits the ground, and slows down until it gets back to near the height you dropped it from
The probe is the ball, and slingshotting around the sun is like bouncing off the ground. The potential energy (height of ball/distance from sun) gets converted to and from kinetic energy (speed).
Salzburg, Mariazell (specifically hiking through Ötschergräben), and anywhere in the Austrian Alps are all excellent.
They’ve since corrected it:
Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that the max apogee of the flight was 49.7 miles. In fact, the VSS Unity reached a max altitude of 55 miles.
The actual website, since the article fails to link to it: https://visdeurbel.nl/en/the-fish-doorbell/