379
Floating Roof Tank (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48430055

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[–] 23 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I know that thing definitely got some fancy physics flavor of fucking vaporized, but in my heart it's out in space just still zooming at breakneck fuckin speed as a testament to human engineering hubris

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Only a tiny fraction of it probably melted. The atmosphere is really thin when you're moving at the velocity that cover seemingly achieved. Raw iron meteors that are much smaller, and moving significantly slower than that steel plate routinely reach the ground intact.

    That's a real use of a time machine. Go back with ultra high speed film and camera so we can catch more than one frame of the thing and determine if it hit escape velocity of the solar system, or if it may be coming back to us in a few hundred thousand years.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    A high-speed camera, which took one frame per millisecond, was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting.[8] After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame. Regarding its speed Brownlee reckoned that "a lower limit could be calculated by considering the time between frames (and I don't remember what that was)", and joked that the best estimate was it was "going like a bat!"[10]

    How many could we get now, 10? That would probably be enough. Time machine it is.

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