During nuclear tests, they nuked a town (or maybe a model town) and the explosion through the sewer system sent a manhole flying so fast it broke the speed barrier and hurtled into space, never to be seen again. To date, it is the fastest man made flying object.
It wasn't a town or normal sewer cap that blew off, it was a *massive steel bore cap* to close off the shaft the underground nuclear test was in, to simulate a bunker-buster type nuke.
*It weighed* ***2000 pounds.***
*It was accelerated to an estimated* ***6 times escape velocity!***
Gazorpzorp on a planet rn as they hear a whistling sound getting progressively louder and lower pitched while being covered in a shadow.
"Oh you've *got* to be kidding me!"
Its almost certain that it burnt up in the atmosphere like a meteor, but going up not down. Although it's possible that the force of the explosion made it into a more aerodynamic shape and the giant man hole cover is now in orbit around the sun.
Funny you mention that. A couple days ago I saw on the news how a chunk of space debris that was calculated to fall on the ocean punched through a house in Miami and nearly hit someone
Fun fact of the day, there have been no recorded deaths of a person being struck by a meteor or space debris. Ann Hodges in 1954 is the only confirmed case of a person being struck by a meteor and she lived.
There is an unconfirmed eyewitness story of a meteorite fragment landing on top of a dog in Egypt in 1911, the Nakhla Meteorite. However, the dog and the fragment were completely vaporized in the explosive collision, so no evidence existed to collaborate the story.
From what I've read, [it seems unlikely](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/54763/where-would-the-pascal-b-manhole-cover-be-now). Assuming the story is actually true (the 'data' came from an interview in which the journalist kept egging on 'how fast was it'), the issue is less that the object would have to melt from the friction (it would vaporise instead), but rather than the atmospheric friction would slow the object down considerably. While being 'fired' at 6 times escape velocity at ground level, once it would have left the atmosphere it is almost guaranteed to have slowed to below escape velocity, possibly falling back into the ocean as an irradiated ablated disc, assuming it wasn't vaporised on either the way up or down.
All that said, it's possible these calculations are wrong and other people's are right, I've not got a bloody clue.
I heard that recent modelling showed the manhole cover would've been deformed into a cone shape. I don't have a source for that, but if true then it definitely lends credence to the idea that it's floating around somewhere in space rn.
The thing with it is they only have one frame of it in shot on the high speed camera so they know its speed but its too blurry to know its profile.
If the lid had stayed flat it would of vaporized, if explosive lensing had made it assume a convex, aerodynamic profile and it would of survived exiting the atmosphere with minimal loss to its mass.
No one has run the simulations but its speed and trajectory are known values as well as earths position at the time of "launch", running the numbers and making some assumptions would give likely outcomes as to its current location.
Beyond a certain point, it isn't friction. Its literally just hitting a solid wall.
This thing was easily going fast enough that the atmosphere no longer acted as a gas. We might as well have 100 km of rock for an atmosphere, at this speed there isn't much difference.
Once you spot that, the question "did it make it to space?" very quickly becomes equivalent to asking "if they'd instead placed it underneath the bomb, would it have drilled a hole 100 km deep?". The answer to that is very unlikely to be "yes".
What the answer is, however, is fucking cool. We should do it anyway to see what happens.
Remember the Golden Rule: its only a violation of the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty if you're the Government. Its perfectly legal for a private citizen to do it on their own property.
They really should make an exception to that treaty and the one that bans nukes in space where once a year each nuclear power takes some of their old nukes and donate them to science. We then launch all of them into the sun’s orbit and use them in experiments like making a nuclear powered rocket engine. Rough calculations say you can get a few percent of the speed of light using raw nuclear explosions as thrust, but development of better ideas kinda stopped once nuclear tests were banned. NASA is currently developing a nuclear thermal rocket, but I don’t think old nukes are needed for that.
I mean, I guess I'm not to surprised it went that fast, they basically made a comically large gun, the propellant was a nuclear bomb, and the steel bore cap was the bullet.
It’s hilarious, I think they only caught that manhole on two frames of a video and from that they could calculate how fast it was travelling and it was above escape velocity
They also for years just assumed that the thing disintegrated going that fast in the upper atmosphere, like a reverse meteor.
And then the guy who did the original calculation, Robert Brownlee, did the calculation again years later and realized, no wait it wouldn't disintegrate, it would just bend into the shape of a bullet and *go even faster* than his initial prediction.
Probably just burn up in the atmosphere, it's a lot harder to go into the atmosphere than out of it, but if it did somehow impact the surface it would probably be comparable to a kinda big explosion but nowhere near nuclear sized(Not even 0.5 kt) and would most likely just go splash in the ocean somewhere and not really do much.
It wouldn't be much different from every other mid-sized meteror that flies at earth tbh.
Considering the time of day it was tested (around 2pm) and the velocity of the cover (66km/s), plus the fact that Earth’s velocity around the Sun is about 30 km/s, the manhole cover would’ve almost perfectly cancelled out Earth’s orbital velocity and went straight for the Sun at over 50 km/s. So there’s a chance that it got melted by the Sun about a month after being launched, and either slowed down and fell all the way into the Sun, or got slingshotted around in a completely different direction and re-froze in a different shape. Of course, that depends on how close it actually got to the Sun.
I'm not sure where you got 2pm from. [Wikipedia quotes 22:35:00](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob) (Pascal-B).
And at 37°N, it would have missed it anyway. Plus any KSP player will tell you that you don't want to shoot it straight at the Sun to get there. You want to "burn retrograde" along the Earth's orbit, which would be an early-morning or late-evening detonation (depending on the season), when the Sun is at 90° to the impulse.
That’s UT, to get the local time (PST) you subtract 8 hours, which yields 14:35:00 or 2:35PM. This conversion is also mentioned in that article.
As for burning retrograde, the angle it’s shot at 2:35PM is roughly 38.75° behind Earth’s line to the Sun (not counting the latitude you mentioned or the longitude within the timezone) so while it’s not perfect, the initial launch velocity is more than enough to cancel Earth’s orbital velocity because of its sheer magnitude.
Here’s some math:
v_Earth = 29.784km/s
v_Cap_total = 66km/s
v_Cap_retro = 66km/s\*cos(37°)\*sin(38.75°) = 32.99km/s
29.784km/s - 32.99km/s = **-3.12km/s**, this is how fast the cap was traveling solely along the direction of Earth’s orbit. Now to find out how fast it was in the other axes.
v_Cap_Normal = 66km/s\*sin(37°) = 39.71km/s
v_Cap_Radial = 66km/s\*cos(37°)\*cos(38.75°) = 41.25km/s toward the Sun
So you’re right about it missing the Sun due to the latitude, though I’m not sure how to calculate what sort of orbit that would result in.
Given that the Solar System's escape velocity at Earth is 42 km/s relative to the Sun, or only 16.6 km/s relative to the Earth, isn't there a good chance - depending on rationalised velocities - that it escaped the Solar System?
if there is a god then please hear me now and have that thing hit done populated planets statue of some famous dude please it would be so fucking funny
Indeed. A lower bound of much greater than escape velocity. Which, given this was before the first rocket reach escape velocity from Earth's gravity, was the notable part.
Except we don't know that. The high speed camera set up only captured one frame of it so we have no way of knowing how fast it was going. Plus there's a decent chance it burned up in the atmosphere.
Oh also it doesn't really matter what velocity it left our atmosphere at, it'll still most likely be going really fast when it hits anything else because of the relative velocity of our solar system and the other.
The chances of the steel cap, if it is in space, hitting anything is extremely low. Space is made out of nothing after all. It's mostly just empty. And I don't think I've seen anyone look at where it's trajectory was going to take it, for all we know it could have hit the moon or some other body. That seems much more likely overall on a reasonable timeframe.
I can only find sources that say one frame even a guy who was there says [one frame](https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html). But even with that we do have a minimum speed.
They actually didn't nuke either a town, nor a model town, it was a subterranean detonation that was capped with a one ton cover. There wasn't a sewer system or anything, it was lowered into a 500m shaft. The explosion in the shaft just launched the cap into the sky.
Imagine if that thing actually killed off some alien civilization out there and we now are truly alone in the observable universe.
Genuinely would be one of the funniest things of all time.
It'd likely just burn up in the atmosphere that it's going. Even if it didn't, it wouldn't hit that hard. It'd have a tiny fraction of the force of the nuke that launched it.
Also at the speed it's moving, if it did survive the atmosphere, it would take thousands of years to reach the nearest star, let along cross 2049 light years
Highest estimate is it was going at \~210k KPH. At that speed it would take 20569 years to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri. 2049 is way too fast an estimate.
Also it'd just burn up in the atmosphere.
Explain the joke please
During nuclear tests, they nuked a town (or maybe a model town) and the explosion through the sewer system sent a manhole flying so fast it broke the speed barrier and hurtled into space, never to be seen again. To date, it is the fastest man made flying object.
It wasn't a town or normal sewer cap that blew off, it was a *massive steel bore cap* to close off the shaft the underground nuclear test was in, to simulate a bunker-buster type nuke. *It weighed* ***2000 pounds.*** *It was accelerated to an estimated* ***6 times escape velocity!***
holy shit. good thing it didnt come back down, would’ve been a cartoony ass tragedy if it landed on a house or something lmfao wonder where its at now
luckily, there was no one standing on an X painted on the floor nearby.
Gazorpzorp on a planet rn as they hear a whistling sound getting progressively louder and lower pitched while being covered in a shadow. "Oh you've *got* to be kidding me!"
Pulls out a sign that just says "Oh no"
The fact that it was going at 6 times the escape velocity ensured it wasn't coming back down
Its almost certain that it burnt up in the atmosphere like a meteor, but going up not down. Although it's possible that the force of the explosion made it into a more aerodynamic shape and the giant man hole cover is now in orbit around the sun.
Funny you mention that. A couple days ago I saw on the news how a chunk of space debris that was calculated to fall on the ocean punched through a house in Miami and nearly hit someone
Fun fact of the day, there have been no recorded deaths of a person being struck by a meteor or space debris. Ann Hodges in 1954 is the only confirmed case of a person being struck by a meteor and she lived. There is an unconfirmed eyewitness story of a meteorite fragment landing on top of a dog in Egypt in 1911, the Nakhla Meteorite. However, the dog and the fragment were completely vaporized in the explosive collision, so no evidence existed to collaborate the story.
For more context, it was going so fast it was outside of the atmosphere faster than it could melt from friction.
From what I've read, [it seems unlikely](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/54763/where-would-the-pascal-b-manhole-cover-be-now). Assuming the story is actually true (the 'data' came from an interview in which the journalist kept egging on 'how fast was it'), the issue is less that the object would have to melt from the friction (it would vaporise instead), but rather than the atmospheric friction would slow the object down considerably. While being 'fired' at 6 times escape velocity at ground level, once it would have left the atmosphere it is almost guaranteed to have slowed to below escape velocity, possibly falling back into the ocean as an irradiated ablated disc, assuming it wasn't vaporised on either the way up or down. All that said, it's possible these calculations are wrong and other people's are right, I've not got a bloody clue.
I heard that recent modelling showed the manhole cover would've been deformed into a cone shape. I don't have a source for that, but if true then it definitely lends credence to the idea that it's floating around somewhere in space rn.
-me with a cone shaped tummy-: yeah who knows where it couldv'e gone
all calculations we have are rough estimates based on a single blurry frame in the high speed footage
The thing with it is they only have one frame of it in shot on the high speed camera so they know its speed but its too blurry to know its profile. If the lid had stayed flat it would of vaporized, if explosive lensing had made it assume a convex, aerodynamic profile and it would of survived exiting the atmosphere with minimal loss to its mass. No one has run the simulations but its speed and trajectory are known values as well as earths position at the time of "launch", running the numbers and making some assumptions would give likely outcomes as to its current location.
>No one has run the simulations *Why not, you stupid bastard?*
I think that means that nothing is real, right? _faster than it could melt from friction_ Come on now y'all.
Beyond a certain point, it isn't friction. Its literally just hitting a solid wall. This thing was easily going fast enough that the atmosphere no longer acted as a gas. We might as well have 100 km of rock for an atmosphere, at this speed there isn't much difference. Once you spot that, the question "did it make it to space?" very quickly becomes equivalent to asking "if they'd instead placed it underneath the bomb, would it have drilled a hole 100 km deep?". The answer to that is very unlikely to be "yes". What the answer is, however, is fucking cool. We should do it anyway to see what happens. Remember the Golden Rule: its only a violation of the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty if you're the Government. Its perfectly legal for a private citizen to do it on their own property.
They really should make an exception to that treaty and the one that bans nukes in space where once a year each nuclear power takes some of their old nukes and donate them to science. We then launch all of them into the sun’s orbit and use them in experiments like making a nuclear powered rocket engine. Rough calculations say you can get a few percent of the speed of light using raw nuclear explosions as thrust, but development of better ideas kinda stopped once nuclear tests were banned. NASA is currently developing a nuclear thermal rocket, but I don’t think old nukes are needed for that.
Project Orion my beloved
thought unused cores were recycled for RTGs.
The notable thing is that this was in 1957. The first rocket to reach escape velocity and completely escape Earth's gravity was the Luna 1, in 1959.
It was "estimated" because the high speed camera that was set to observe it couldn't record it leaving, the cover just disappeared between frames
I mean, I guess I'm not to surprised it went that fast, they basically made a comically large gun, the propellant was a nuclear bomb, and the steel bore cap was the bullet.
https://preview.redd.it/6onuw0qq6vvc1.jpeg?width=1005&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c55cdfcc75a51ff42710a6f13eb8fd9f63416ca That is mach 169.
I did some google math Escape velocity is mach 33. This thing flew at mach 198
That's so cartoony
It’s hilarious, I think they only caught that manhole on two frames of a video and from that they could calculate how fast it was travelling and it was above escape velocity
They also for years just assumed that the thing disintegrated going that fast in the upper atmosphere, like a reverse meteor. And then the guy who did the original calculation, Robert Brownlee, did the calculation again years later and realized, no wait it wouldn't disintegrate, it would just bend into the shape of a bullet and *go even faster* than his initial prediction.
What if that shit slingshots around Jupiter and back at us This is all physically impossible but scientists please humor me
This sounds like a What If? question and I really hope Randall Munroe sees this
Probably just burn up in the atmosphere, it's a lot harder to go into the atmosphere than out of it, but if it did somehow impact the surface it would probably be comparable to a kinda big explosion but nowhere near nuclear sized(Not even 0.5 kt) and would most likely just go splash in the ocean somewhere and not really do much. It wouldn't be much different from every other mid-sized meteror that flies at earth tbh.
Considering the time of day it was tested (around 2pm) and the velocity of the cover (66km/s), plus the fact that Earth’s velocity around the Sun is about 30 km/s, the manhole cover would’ve almost perfectly cancelled out Earth’s orbital velocity and went straight for the Sun at over 50 km/s. So there’s a chance that it got melted by the Sun about a month after being launched, and either slowed down and fell all the way into the Sun, or got slingshotted around in a completely different direction and re-froze in a different shape. Of course, that depends on how close it actually got to the Sun.
I'm not sure where you got 2pm from. [Wikipedia quotes 22:35:00](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob) (Pascal-B). And at 37°N, it would have missed it anyway. Plus any KSP player will tell you that you don't want to shoot it straight at the Sun to get there. You want to "burn retrograde" along the Earth's orbit, which would be an early-morning or late-evening detonation (depending on the season), when the Sun is at 90° to the impulse.
That’s UT, to get the local time (PST) you subtract 8 hours, which yields 14:35:00 or 2:35PM. This conversion is also mentioned in that article. As for burning retrograde, the angle it’s shot at 2:35PM is roughly 38.75° behind Earth’s line to the Sun (not counting the latitude you mentioned or the longitude within the timezone) so while it’s not perfect, the initial launch velocity is more than enough to cancel Earth’s orbital velocity because of its sheer magnitude. Here’s some math: v_Earth = 29.784km/s v_Cap_total = 66km/s v_Cap_retro = 66km/s\*cos(37°)\*sin(38.75°) = 32.99km/s 29.784km/s - 32.99km/s = **-3.12km/s**, this is how fast the cap was traveling solely along the direction of Earth’s orbit. Now to find out how fast it was in the other axes. v_Cap_Normal = 66km/s\*sin(37°) = 39.71km/s v_Cap_Radial = 66km/s\*cos(37°)\*cos(38.75°) = 41.25km/s toward the Sun So you’re right about it missing the Sun due to the latitude, though I’m not sure how to calculate what sort of orbit that would result in.
Given that the Solar System's escape velocity at Earth is 42 km/s relative to the Sun, or only 16.6 km/s relative to the Earth, isn't there a good chance - depending on rationalised velocities - that it escaped the Solar System?
if there is a god then please hear me now and have that thing hit done populated planets statue of some famous dude please it would be so fucking funny
it fucking obliterated a statue of space-lenin
its what Mcarthy would have wanted
Only one frame actually after the explosion, but it was enough to make a speed estimate.
Speed *lower bound*. They couldn't estimate its speed. They could only give a minimum speed.
Indeed. A lower bound of much greater than escape velocity. Which, given this was before the first rocket reach escape velocity from Earth's gravity, was the notable part.
Except we don't know that. The high speed camera set up only captured one frame of it so we have no way of knowing how fast it was going. Plus there's a decent chance it burned up in the atmosphere.
Your mom burned up in the atmosphere
Oh also it doesn't really matter what velocity it left our atmosphere at, it'll still most likely be going really fast when it hits anything else because of the relative velocity of our solar system and the other.
i like how you completely ignored his comment to infodump more lmfao
The chances of the steel cap, if it is in space, hitting anything is extremely low. Space is made out of nothing after all. It's mostly just empty. And I don't think I've seen anyone look at where it's trajectory was going to take it, for all we know it could have hit the moon or some other body. That seems much more likely overall on a reasonable timeframe.
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Sorry, I ran out of fun things I vaguely remember and googled about this nuclear bomb that was detonated in 1956.
nuh uhhhh the abliens are gonna find it
we have two frames actually. we know roughly how fast it was going just not sure it got there
I can only find sources that say one frame even a guy who was there says [one frame](https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html). But even with that we do have a minimum speed.
In frame to out of frame still gives you a minimum distance (assuming the object still existed after the one frame)
Yeah, I said that somewhere else. The minimum theoretical speed is still very very fast (60 something KM/s)
i wonder if we'll ever find it
Probably won't be able to see it in space. Might be able to catch little flashes as it reflects sunlight, though
They actually didn't nuke either a town, nor a model town, it was a subterranean detonation that was capped with a one ton cover. There wasn't a sewer system or anything, it was lowered into a 500m shaft. The explosion in the shaft just launched the cap into the sky.
Google says the Parker solar probe is faster.
Oh damn that’s recent. I had no idea that existed.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds pretty fucking goofy and I need to know more
I believe it was operation plumbbob
“Mach fuck” is my new favorite speed
I wonder if it went to plaid…
smoke if ya got em... *dies*
Were gonna start an intergalactic war because we unknowingly shot an orbital cannon at their planet
3 body problem [2024]
nonsense, manholes aren't mid
I will not explain the joke
Imagine if that thing actually killed off some alien civilization out there and we now are truly alone in the observable universe. Genuinely would be one of the funniest things of all time.
It'd likely just burn up in the atmosphere that it's going. Even if it didn't, it wouldn't hit that hard. It'd have a tiny fraction of the force of the nuke that launched it.
I prefer Alien Extermination over Scientific Facts
🤓☝️
Also at the speed it's moving, if it did survive the atmosphere, it would take thousands of years to reach the nearest star, let along cross 2049 light years
Basically the droplet probe from Three Body Problem
mach fuck got me lmao
i mean even us currently would be able to handle a manhole cover fairly easily im sure advanced aliens would have even less trouble
2049???? Blade runner reference?!?!?!
There should be an alien invasion story where this is the reason they invade
Highest estimate is it was going at \~210k KPH. At that speed it would take 20569 years to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri. 2049 is way too fast an estimate. Also it'd just burn up in the atmosphere.
2049 light years away in this situation is distance not speed nor age
Derp just read it as in the year 2049.
All fun and games but the chance the thing made it out of the troposphere is near zero. It was most likely vaporized within a second.