drdan82408a t1_jdy0666 wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:37 AM

I assume you’re talking about debris that is already in space…. Well, there are many, many problems with this idea.

getting all the debris together, in one place, to put on a rocket would be massively difficult.
it’s not a matter of just aiming it towards the sun and firing a rocket. I mean, you could do it that way, but it would be massively inefficient. You would have to burn retrograde compared to earth’s orbit to lower the perihelion of your probe, so there’s no “missing Venus and hitting the sun”, if you miss your target you’re just in interplanetary space for however many years until you hit who knows what, or most likely forever.
getting all of this out of low earth orbit would be massively inefficient as well. It would be much, much easier to deorbit it safely into earth, aiming at oceans and/or unpopulated regions.
we don’t want to contaminate Venus unnecessarily.

Postnificent OP t1_jdy37ah wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:59 AM

Contaminate Venus cannot be a reason. It doesn’t make sense at all.

drdan82408a t1_jdy3p53 wrote on March 28, 2023 at 1:03 AM

Sure it does. We might want to be able to study it some day, we don’t know what might be in the atmosphere, we don’t know what extraterrestrial life might be like (there are extreme thermophyles and halophyles on earth for example, and even if not for life then there could be geological or meteorological research to be done) but the other reasons I gave should be more than sufficient.

titanofmeme t1_jdyuhjo wrote on March 28, 2023 at 4:42 AM

Yes it absolutely does. Planets of the solar system are the finest specimens in current astronomy due to their accessibility. As soon as they are contaminated, the specimen is compromised.