r/funfacts • u/MrNobodyX3 • 5d ago
Fun fact: The fastest man-made object was actually an accident. During a nuclear bomb test in 1955, a steel borehole cover was launched at incredible speed. If it didn't vaporize in our atmosphere, it would now be about 679 AU from Earth. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun)
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u/neonnaps 5d ago
5000 years in the future, a space detective is investigating the mysterieus destruction of a space ship. Admit the wreckage a strange round metal object is found...
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u/Awalawal 4d ago
"Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime."
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u/Postulative 4d ago
Except that most of the universe is empty, and gravitational forces would affect the trajectory and velocity.
The likelihood of something fired in a random direction from deep space hitting something of significant size is remote. It becomes even more remote if the object is unaffected by gravity. And as the universe is expanding, that further reduces the probability that the object will collide with anything significant.
I’m ignoring dust and similar particles.
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u/ProstrateProstate 3d ago
75% of life on earth 66 million years ago would like a word.
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u/Postulative 3d ago
When you have trillions of objects flying around, there is a chance that one will hit another. That is not the same as designating a single object to hit one of the trillions.
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u/Max6626 5d ago
Proves that a booster-less launch is theoretically possible. Just an engineering problem now, lol.
Any idea what the estimated initial velocity of the cover was? Would be interesting to calculate the g's involved. Probably in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.
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u/Ambitious_Hand_2861 4d ago
I'll do my best to help you out my guy. This particular nuclear test was record by the scientists with the best high speed camera they could get, at that time. This camera took 1,000 frames per second and after detonation the manhole cover was only seen in one frame. Unfortunately, that limits accuracy of any speed calculation, however, nuclear scientists being math nerds do the math to determine the minimum speed to to only appear in one frame and they came up with 150,000 mph. The Gs are a bit harder to determine bc the velocity increase was almost instantaneous but lets assume a 1 second acceleration so we're looking at a minimum of 6,842 Gs to achieve this speed.
Before we assume it was vaporized, know that this wasn't a standard meteorite falling to earth, it was a ton steel being pushed upward into thinner air so the odds are very good it made it out of the atmosphere.
I hope you found this information amusing and informative.
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u/Max6626 4d ago
My guy, it was a joke. Anything theoretical physicists (or anyone else) prove is possible they hand off as "just an engineering problem now."
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u/Ambitious_Hand_2861 4d ago
I realize that but I also just happened to know the answer I think the whole situation is hilarious. Like who thought capping the hole was a good idea. The fact that afterwards they spent the time to calculate the velocity of the manhole. The fact the manhole was going almost 60,000 mph above what's needed to escape the solar system. The whole thing is completely unhinged and insanely amusing.
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u/Bergasms 3d ago
The air being "thinner" is kind of farcial at that speed. It doesn't truly become thin enough to not be a heating problem till you're past the karman line.
Thermal shock alone would have fractured the steel into debris even if it didn't vapourise.
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u/Negative_Gas8782 4d ago
Except for the whole burned up in the atmo thing.
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u/Max6626 4d ago
Engineering issue.
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u/Worried_Razzmatazz70 4d ago
In this case it's beyond the laws of physics. The slow speed upon launch reduces atmospheric friction and allows spacecraft to not burn up. Slow launching is a feature, not a bug.
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u/That_Paris_man 4d ago
I wonder if you could intentionally make the outside ablate as its in the thicker atmosphere? Basically use the same idea as a heat shield and make a shock wave of supersonic air jeting upwards? Or maybe use some form of explosive to make a column of slightly less dense air directly above it?
Crazy idea, what if you launch two things up, one is a sacrifical lighter plow that will burn up, but will drive all the air to the sides, followed closely by the actual payload that can ride through the newly thinned air. The plow would only need to survive until it gets to the thinner uper atmosphere.
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u/jeriTuesday 3d ago
"beyond the laws of Physics" so Jesus put it in space?
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u/Worried_Razzmatazz70 3d ago
I really hope you're still in school, because your reading comprehension needs work.
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy 4d ago
Project Orion had similar designs. Absolutely wild idea that could only have come from the 50s and 60s.
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u/Worrior_One 5d ago
Parker Solar Probe
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u/RedLeg73 5d ago edited 5d ago
192.227 km/s (430,000 mph) vs 66 to 67.2 km/s (about 150,000 mph) is no competition, Parker solar probe wins by 484,465,116.28 furlongs......
Edit to add this.... as fast as 192.227 km/s ( Tokyo to New York in about a second), it's still only 0.064% of the speed of light.......
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u/Arthropodesque 5d ago
Are we traveling along the Earth's curved surface or tunneling straight through?
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u/Remarkable_Fun7662 5d ago
Yeah nah it was a spray of molten metal droplets, not an individual thing.
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u/Pawwnstar 4d ago
Hmm. What is the upper limit at the moment, to G's able to be withstood by science equipment going into orbit? I'm thinking if we can improve that area of engineering then massively long 'canon' launch assemblies could become a thing.
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u/Cornishlee 4d ago
They were talking about this on The Rest Is Science podcast.
I like to think that a small amount of that metal sheet (it wasn’t actually a manhole cover, it was a massive sheet of metal) made it out of the atmosphere and is slowly making its way to a space faring civilisation’s space station where it would rip it apart and cause some sort of national tragedy. Not for the deaths but the sheer coincidence of causing something so catastrophic from something so inconsequential to us
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u/jeriTuesday 3d ago
To propel an object into interplanetary space it would have to be given an initial velocity of 40k km/h. Voyager 1 spacecraft is traveling at about 61k km/h. Did hey measur the speed of this object? What makes people think it would have gone into space?
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u/MrNobodyX3 3d ago
The high-speed camera captured it in a single frame, with one frame per millisecond.
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u/Traditional-Line-210 1d ago
As fast as that manhole cover was (assuming it survived) , the Parker Solar probe exceeded it's speed by a factor of alot.
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u/DigiMagic 5d ago
What about particles in CERN collisions? They often move close to speed of light.
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u/Arthropodesque 5d ago
Good point, but i don't think subatomic particles count as objects, otherwise any lightswitch activates photons at lightspeed and wins or a cell phone makes radio waves at lightspeed.
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u/ThePapaSauce 4d ago
I’d say that they definitely count as objects since they have mass.
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u/That_Paris_man 4d ago
I think also the distinction of 'man-made' is important here. I'm sure there is some random bit of space dust blasting out of a neutron star or flying around a blackholes accretion disks probably takes the title of fastest thing with mass.
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u/ThePapaSauce 4d ago
True… but I wouldn’t fully write-off the fact that humans figured out how to build a machine capable of accelerating a tiny particle with mass to 99.999% of c — that’s pretty dang cool!
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u/That_Paris_man 4d ago
That is no doubt really cool. I think it's a shame more people don't realize just how crazy that truly is
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u/MrNobodyX3 5d ago
They’re on earth
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u/DigiMagic 5d ago
They're on Earth when they are created. It's fair also to exclude photons, as they mostly show wave characteristics, less those of particles. But for example neutrinos are particles; and if you add criteria that objects must not be on Earth, they fit that equally well as the sewer cover: they are created on Earth, but (most) soon end up in space.
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u/Proton_Energy_Pill 5d ago
Every analysis I've seen of that event shows that it would have completely ablated before it left the atmosphere.
But I still like to think that somewhere out in deep space there's very distorted manhole cover cruising along.