- Joined
- Mar 15, 2019
- Messages
- 708
My son asked me the other day about alien life so we started discussing it. I told him that in all probability we humans are not the only intelligent life in the universe, the numbers favor it in fact. Just from the sheer number of stars it is likely life also arose in many other places and had even longer to advance than we have had on Earth. But that those same numbers and also the sheet distances involved make it equally unlikely. So we started talking about the closest star besides the sun being 4.5 light years away and how long it would take for even the fastest man made object to get there.
So that lead up to a look for the fastest man made object in history. That turned out to not be the Voyager spacecraft as I thought. That one is currently going about 38,000 miles per hour. The current fastest man made object ever goes to a solar probe which achieved a speed of 158,000 miles per hour. Even then it took 2 years to get to the sun. But the speed record of the fastest man made object before that was from 1957 and remained the record at 150,000 miles per hour (estimated). The record stood for 17 years before Helios solar probe eclipsed it.
So what was this object? It was a plate of steel armor 4" thick and weighing between 1 and 2 tons. I have come up with varying weights in my further investigation. How did they get it to go so fast? Well, during the nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site one of the bombs was placed at the bottom of a bore hole 500 feet deep. When the bomb was detonated it had far more power than expected and shot fire several hundred feet into the air from the uncovered bore hole as well as spreading some radioactive material into the atmosphere. The scientists were concerned about it enough that they decided to plug the hole for the next test. So they placed a 4" thick, of a weight between 1 and 2 tons, piece of armor plating over the top of the hole and welded into place. There were serious doubts that the plate would work but the scientists were curious enough about it that they placed a high speed camera to capture what happened to the plate when the explosion occurred.
The cap failed in spectacular fashion. The high speed camera recorded 1 frame of the cap and then it was gone. It was never seen again. Judging by the speed of the camera 1 frame would indicate a speed of at least 150,000 miles per hour. Calculations done before and after the testing indicated the cap could achieve a speed 6 times the escape velocity of Earth's gravity.
As the plate was never seen again there will always remain the question of what happened to it. There are 2 theories. 1 is it went into space like a "bat out of hell" and continues to this day screaming through the vacuum of space and the other is aerodynamic drag and heating caused the plate to melt and disintegrate before it left the atmosphere. At the speed it was going though it would have traversed the entire atmosphere in less than 1 second and been through the densest part of the atmosphere in about 1/3 of a second.
I believe this experiment deserves some serious supercomputer time to decide if it actually did make it to space. Why? Because if it did it beat the Russian Sputnik as being the first man made object to get into orbital space by 2 months.
So that lead up to a look for the fastest man made object in history. That turned out to not be the Voyager spacecraft as I thought. That one is currently going about 38,000 miles per hour. The current fastest man made object ever goes to a solar probe which achieved a speed of 158,000 miles per hour. Even then it took 2 years to get to the sun. But the speed record of the fastest man made object before that was from 1957 and remained the record at 150,000 miles per hour (estimated). The record stood for 17 years before Helios solar probe eclipsed it.
So what was this object? It was a plate of steel armor 4" thick and weighing between 1 and 2 tons. I have come up with varying weights in my further investigation. How did they get it to go so fast? Well, during the nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site one of the bombs was placed at the bottom of a bore hole 500 feet deep. When the bomb was detonated it had far more power than expected and shot fire several hundred feet into the air from the uncovered bore hole as well as spreading some radioactive material into the atmosphere. The scientists were concerned about it enough that they decided to plug the hole for the next test. So they placed a 4" thick, of a weight between 1 and 2 tons, piece of armor plating over the top of the hole and welded into place. There were serious doubts that the plate would work but the scientists were curious enough about it that they placed a high speed camera to capture what happened to the plate when the explosion occurred.
The cap failed in spectacular fashion. The high speed camera recorded 1 frame of the cap and then it was gone. It was never seen again. Judging by the speed of the camera 1 frame would indicate a speed of at least 150,000 miles per hour. Calculations done before and after the testing indicated the cap could achieve a speed 6 times the escape velocity of Earth's gravity.
As the plate was never seen again there will always remain the question of what happened to it. There are 2 theories. 1 is it went into space like a "bat out of hell" and continues to this day screaming through the vacuum of space and the other is aerodynamic drag and heating caused the plate to melt and disintegrate before it left the atmosphere. At the speed it was going though it would have traversed the entire atmosphere in less than 1 second and been through the densest part of the atmosphere in about 1/3 of a second.
I believe this experiment deserves some serious supercomputer time to decide if it actually did make it to space. Why? Because if it did it beat the Russian Sputnik as being the first man made object to get into orbital space by 2 months.
