We’ve sent spacecraft to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. But there is one direction in the Solar System that remains extraordinarily difficult to reach: up.
Most planets orbit the Sun inside roughly the same plane, and every spacecraft launched from Earth inherits our planet’s enormous sideways velocity around the Sun. That makes traveling across the Solar System surprisingly efficient — but climbing far above or below it requires an extreme change in velocity.
In fact, reaching a point above the Sun can demand more energy than traveling billions of kilometers toward the outer Solar System.
That limitation has left us with a strange blind spot. We have explored distant planets in extraordinary detail, yet the regions above and below our own Sun remain among the least explored places in the Solar System.
In this video, we explore why escaping the planetary plane is so difficult, what Ulysses and Solar Orbiter discovered, why we still don’t know the true shape of the heliosphere, and the extraordinary maneuver that could finally take a spacecraft far above the Solar System.
And strangely, the best way to go up may be to fall toward the Sun first.
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Credits: Ron Miller, Mark A. Garlick / MarkGarlick.com ,Elon Musk/SpaceX/ Flickr
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0:00 The Direction We Can Barely Reach
2:32 The 30 km/s Trap
3:53 Why “Up” Costs So Much
5:40 The Sun’s Unseen Territory
7:41 The Only Missions That Escaped the Plane
8:51 Our First Look at the Solar Pole
9:56 We Don’t Know the Shape of Home
12:15 The Insane Dive Toward the Sun
14:15 The Sail That Never Runs Out
15:01 What We’d See From Above
16:18 The Photograph Humanity Still Doesn’t Have
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