I read somewhere it must’ve turned molten from the atmosphere, but l wonder if like little droplets of metal fell down to earth or if it was just vaporized.
I read somewhere it must’ve turned molten from the atmosphere, but l wonder if like little droplets of metal fell down to earth or if it was just vaporized.
Anything that wasn’t vaporized was likely launched out into space at speeds exceeding escape velocity for Earth’s gravitational field by aat least a factor of 6. So if there was anything left after the explosion and wind friction, it’s out in space, probably moving towards the sun.
The best part of that story is that the engineer on the project initially rejected the metal cap, because he knew it would not do anything to contain the blast. His supervisor overruled him, and insisted they install the cap. The engineer complied, but also ensured a high speed camera was trained on the cap to capture just how spectacularly stupid his manager was.
The high speed camera was intended to be used to calculate the speed of the cap. It was going so fast it was only captured in 1 frame, which is only enough information to put a lower limit on the speed.
How do you calculate speed at all with only one frame?
It was a lower bound. It had to have been traveling fast enough to only be captured in one frame.
Gosh, the one frame probably didn’t even have a reference time to work from.
You dont, hence why only a lower limit could be established with a single frame capture.
Basically like saying “if we only got 1 frame, then it must be going faster than x mph/kph”
Distance between not moving and gone compiled against recording timestamp and detonation.
It’s, not very accurate. But you do get a lower bound.
Wouldn’t the air resistance be insane at those speeds? If it didn’t just slow it down significantly, the friction would add even more heat to it.
Yes, that’s why most people believe it vaporized completely.