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.
However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated…
Just four and a half orders of magnitude off. Oops.
It was vaporized before anything cool happened.
When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found. In a conversation with Bill Ogle, Brownlee estimated its velocity as “six times the escape velocity from the Earth”—approximately 67.2 km/s (150,000 mph).[10] Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere
I’m sure it was vaporized but I still think we should get MythBusters to test it with modern camera and tracking equipment.
Oh my god yes. I’m generally against nuclear blasts but IF we are gonna keep doing it, why not in the most entertaining and educational way possible.
It reached orbit and is now actively seeking and destroying Musk’s Starlink satellites.
Man can dream
Do your best, manhole cover.
Doubtful. That thing was traveling three times faster than the fastest meteorite we’ve recorded entering the atmosphere. It probably vaporized almost as soon as it took off since 900 kilos of steel is nothing, ablatively speaking, at those speeds in sea level air pressure.
Hypothetically, even if the heat of the blast didn’t vaporize it, I don’t see how something that size moving at 150,000 mph wouldn’t ablate from intense friction with the atmosphere before reaching space.
Dang couple friends using that word ablate in the comments. I gotta look it up.
Before I look it up, I imagined a scenario where it could happen. This is fresh out my butt brain(I’m playing with the phrase “pulling it out of my butt”, meaning making it up for my non-native english speaking friends) I could see this place(existence) playing a crazy trick that when something reaches a certain speed it creates a heat bubble kind of thing around the object, and the object is not affected by extreme heats, because the friction or air resistance around the object make a protective covering, kind of like how sharks have rough skin that grips the water around touching it to apply to the friction of the water around it. Although that’s what I remember from early school science classes.
Ablate is a fun word, in this case; To remove by erosion, melting, evaporation, or vaporization.
Liquid things going in high speed through the atmosphere get atomized. So, yeah, it just became dust and went down in some rain.
My guess is that it just vaporized and then turned into dust.
all we are is dust in the wind
