How fast do comets that pass thru our solar system travel?

Question

and do comets travel at greater speeds than our current space ships can? if so, wouldn't it be a good idea to land a manned or unmanned ship on a comet and whip around the comets path collecting photo's and data along the way? haleys comet wont return until about 2061 i believe, and by that time we should have vastly upgraded ships, but i still think that it sounds like a good project either for haleys, and any of the other comets that come thru. what do u think?

Answer 1

Comets obey Kepler's laws, which means they go really fast near the Sun, like over 100,000 MPH, and really slow far from the sun, like only a few thousand MPH. However, to land softly on a comet, you have to match its speed and orbit. In other words, it does not save fuel. You can put the space craft in a comet like orbit without landing on a comet and without using a drop more fuel than going to and then landing on a comet would take. That assumes a soft landing of course. You could make some super rugged probe and just crash into the Comet at thousands or tens of thousands of miles per hour, but what can do that and survive to do useful work?

Answer 2

It's generally accepted that comets are a part of our solar system, not just passing through. They shuttle back and forth between the inner part of the system and the Oort Cloud (you can look that up.) Therefore, they are travelling at something less than solar escape velocity. (You can look that up, too.)

And people have landed probes on comets, before. IIRC, the Japanese landed one on a comet this year. Perhaps nasa has a feed or a link to what they have learned so far. Good luck!

4 DEC 06, 1710 hrs, GMT.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where the question was destined from the start to be better than the answer. The answer is "it really doesn t matter" because if you are asking this question, then you, like me, are not smart enough to independently verify the answer anyway, and you ll just end up regurgitating whatever answer we feed you. You don t always need to be fixated on the facts when it comes to science. Doing that just makes it inaccessible for so many people. I d probably just take the speed of sound and the speed of light and split the difference and say that s how fast comets travel. Unless your friend is an Astronomy major, they re not likely to call you out on your bogus answer.

Answer 4

No. From the observer's attitude it ought to nonetheless take 2 years for the visitor to go back for this reason the visitor isn't vacationing faster than the speed of light regardless of the particular shown truth that the visitor is getting older at a slower price. The visitor ought to imagine it took lower than 2 years because of time dilation, although the very truth remains is that it nonetheless took 2 years to make the round vacation.