[vannrox]

“A Modest Proposal: Mission to Earth’s Core”, David Stevenson, available at http://www.gps.caltech.edu/faculty/stevenson/coremission

[_Jim]

First, those who expressed a healthy amount of skepticism as to the accuracy of a certain stated number:

Centurion2000:

WTF ? a 30 meter BALL of melted iron is gonna weigh MUCH MORE.

Zeko:

Something's wrong here -- a solid iron sphere about 30 meters in diameter would weigh more by a factor of about a million . . .

Close, but no cigar (you have to actually call it to nail it)

Oberon:

The cut-and-paste failed...the actual number was probably supposed to be 10^8

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have our first winner!

Fredgoblu:

Methinks the author missed a few zeros.

familyop

Yes. Stevenson's "modest proposal" is probably some kind of left/liberal satire.

King Prout:

maybe 10⁸ kg?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have our second winner!

Now, that portion of the original document on the caltech.edu website from which the posted story was developed:

I describe here a mission to Earth?s core in which a probe is imbedded in a large volume of liquid iron alloy that migrates to the core along a crack propagating under the action of gravity.

The time to reach the core is ~ a week and the minimal required volume of iron ~ 10⁸ kg, or about one hour of Earth's iron production.

And last but not least, we have the original document from which specifics were pulled for the posted article:

mission_to_core_(annot).pdf

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks to Vannrox for posting this topic. Volcanism is a well-studied, though poorly understood, source of GGG pings. ;')

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