If humans wanted to put something like the Mars Rover on another planet could they do it? Or could they at least send a missile or something to another planet if they wanted to?
As far as fuel is concerned, it doesn't much matter how far you send it. Once a spacecraft has escaped the Earth's gravity by going fast enough, you can shut off the rocket and it will just keep going forever in a straight line. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft are doing exactly that, having between them visited all the outer planets. Voyager 1 is the furthest away but even after 39 years, its distance is still 0.002 light years. So it will reach the distance of the nearest star in about 70,000 years.
Some instruments are still functioning and sending back data, but eventually Voyager's nuclear power plant will stop working. And that's the problem - unless you can get a spacecraft to go a LOT faster than Voyager, its systems will be dead on arrival anywhere outside the solar system so there will be nothing to control a soft landing.
As far as our own solar system is concerned, it's already been done on all planets that actually have a solid surface, and to Jupiter. Several have soft-landed on Mars and Venus, the MESSENGER probe crashed on Mercury when its mission was finished, and a probe has descended into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
With the help of sling shot maneuvers, 92 billion miles = 1000 AU is likely possible, but takes at least a century, making it likely most of the systems are dead on arrival. Less than a century, if technical advances continue for another 20 years, but very expensive. Much less distance to make a soft landing.
Answers & Comments
Yes. It's been done on Mars.
As far as fuel is concerned, it doesn't much matter how far you send it. Once a spacecraft has escaped the Earth's gravity by going fast enough, you can shut off the rocket and it will just keep going forever in a straight line. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft are doing exactly that, having between them visited all the outer planets. Voyager 1 is the furthest away but even after 39 years, its distance is still 0.002 light years. So it will reach the distance of the nearest star in about 70,000 years.
Some instruments are still functioning and sending back data, but eventually Voyager's nuclear power plant will stop working. And that's the problem - unless you can get a spacecraft to go a LOT faster than Voyager, its systems will be dead on arrival anywhere outside the solar system so there will be nothing to control a soft landing.
As far as our own solar system is concerned, it's already been done on all planets that actually have a solid surface, and to Jupiter. Several have soft-landed on Mars and Venus, the MESSENGER probe crashed on Mercury when its mission was finished, and a probe has descended into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
With the help of sling shot maneuvers, 92 billion miles = 1000 AU is likely possible, but takes at least a century, making it likely most of the systems are dead on arrival. Less than a century, if technical advances continue for another 20 years, but very expensive. Much less distance to make a soft landing.
Yes, but we are talking about a long wait. The fastest deep space probe we've ever built would take 6000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
News flash to the little blue guy, we have already put a Mars rover on another planet - on MARS.
Yes, but it would take thousands of years to get there.
All the way to the ends of space.