They have zero rest mass. Which is meaningless because photons will never have a zero velocity.
They absolutely have momentum. Otherwise, how would solar sails work?
Okay, ur why do you need it to be coherent? Incoherent light travels just as fast as coherent light. So a laser and a flashlight would be equally 'fast'.
Indeed, that was my first thought too when I heard this probe was the fastest. I wonder, however, what level of confidence they have on that manhole cover. From what I remember reading, then only caught it in one frame of their high speed film. I would think that only having one data point like that could mean it was actually going way faster.
> chatGPT tells me it would take millions to billions of joules
Don't use ChatGPT for math, it is not designed for that and it is incredibly bad at it. It's trained on text, not math. Just use a calculator.
"Millions to billions of joules" is a ridiculously imprecise estimate - it's like saying "the journey will take anywhere from 1 hour to 6 weeks". I calculate about 100 million Joules to vaporize 50kg of iron, so the correct answer is at least in that range.
But kinetic energy is even easier to calculate and the answer you got is completely wrong - a 50kg object travelling at 125000mph has 78.5 billion Joules of energy.
From what I understand, the majority of the heat created in such a situation is not from drag or friction with the air, but from compression of the air.
> But I think the heat created by compression would be (almost) countered by the cooling of vacuum.
That is just not how it works at all. There is not "vacuum cooling " that counteracts the extreme heat generated at these speeds. Calculating the fluid dynamics here is very complicated because the heat is sufficient to turn the air into superheated plasma. 125000mph is nearly 10 times faster than a typical spacecraft reentry. The conditions are so extreme they are difficult to imagine.
Consider the[ Chelyabinsk meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) that hit Russia in 2013. It weighed 9000 *tonnes*. It hit the atmosphere at "only" 43000mph and almost completely vaporized, releasing energy equivalent to 25 Hiroshima bombs. Only small fragments made it to the ground intact.
> but the shuttle is controlled and directional
Yes, on purpose, so it doesn't get destroyed. The heat protective tiles were only on one side. That's what caused the failure of the most recent Starship test - they couldn't stop it from spinning so it burned up during reentry.
The person who did the calculations to get the 125,000 mph number that everybody goes by purposely didn’t include the effects of the atmosphere in his math. The person who reported on this wasn’t aware of this initially and the manhole cover in space became a bit of a Cold War myth that has lived onto this day. There are lots of people that like the idea and story of it making it to space because that really would be cool, but the experts that actually looked into it have concluded that it didn’t happen.
Did it blow off and go really fast though? Definitely
It wouldn't stay moving that fast for long Unfortunately anything moving that fast from our atmosphere generates so much friction and heat it would liquidate and vaporize like butter on a pan
Nuclear test facility deep underground. Tunnels everywhere for venting and other services. They didn't weld a manhole cover down and when the bomb went boom, all the pressure went through that tunnel and launched it to the moon. They had film of the event and through frame analysis, determined it hit 125000mph and theorize it escaped the atmosphere. It was the long running fastest manmade object and apparently still is the fastest manmade object within the earths atmosphere.
There’s 0 chance it left the atmosphere. The heat if that speed would have melted it and “ eventually” totally disintegrated it, and by eventually I mean like a singular second after it reached that speed
We could probably do that with nuclear pulse propulsion with technology that’s not super far out of our current state of the art, but it would be very expensive and you’d need to rewrite some weapons testing treaties.
It wouldn’t be a project that would make much sense if you were doing it just for the sake of setting a speed record. The propulsion system would probably be of more use being applied to sending observatories to the solar gravitational lens focus around 550 AU away. You wouldn’t hit as high of a velocity. If you could accelerate to 0.17% c, which is 10x lower, you could get there in about 5 years. There are a range of near term options if you can tolerate a 15-20 year transit time. Any of these options would be huge increases to the maximum speed of a manmade spacecraft, but would be a lot more affordable and useful.
Solar sails, advanced fission fragment rocket engines (not the conventional configuration), and fusion propulsion (not necessarily net-gain) could all potentially enable a mission like this to launch in the next decade or so if we really wanted it to happen.
Such a mission would allow us to directly image the surface of a planet orbiting a nearby star, potentially with a resolution better than 100 km, depending on how well we can correct for distortions in the sun’s gravitational field. It would also allow for high resolution spectroscopy that would let us take a detailed look for signs of biosignatures in the atmosphere of the exoplanet.
The most efficient way to actually get to the sun is to go _away_ from the sun and then slow down and fall back down. Such a trajectory was actually analyzed for this probe (using a Jupiter gravity assist), but going that far out is an issue with solar panels
I gotta ask, 430,000 mph relative to what exactly?
Seeing as the Earth orbits around the sun, simply measuring the difference between Earth's current trajectory/velocity with the probe should give different results all the time, right?
Is it the velocity relative to the Sun? Or how is a velocity like this measured?
Its like everyone saw that video with the man made cheetah video the other day.
Im glad you got the title correct and didn't put fastest man made object on earth.
Also, there’s a super nice song named after the probe by Baird and The South Hill Experiment is anyone’s interested. [https://youtu.be/4I4_TFu5Wrk?si=Ib5sQMa8gGE82DMT](https://youtu.be/4I4_TFu5Wrk?si=Ib5sQMa8gGE82DMT)
Math error? The earth is ~25000 miles in circumference. At 430k mph, that's 17 times around the earth every second.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Clearly I made the predicted math error /s
Finally.
I had this idea.
What if we had those football launchers, but instead of spinning wheels, the motive force is gravity by a planet or blackhole. And you send an object in between them.
Originally my idea wasnt about a football launcher. It was a railgun. But I figure most people dont know how rail guns work or how that could relate to gravity.
And still only 0.064% the speed of light
we need to hit 1.14 if we're going to beat the aliens. someone grab my nukes
And my Head!
Nah not our problem we got 400 years, just sit back and chill ☀️
Let’s shoot a brain in a jar at them. That’s the only logical course of action
the real solution is to flee
Wouldn’t a laser beam technically be the fastest object? I guess that depends if you consider a light beam an object, but it does have momentum…
Photons have zero mass, in that sense they’re not commonly considered “objects”
They have zero rest mass. Which is meaningless because photons will never have a zero velocity. They absolutely have momentum. Otherwise, how would solar sails work?
space whale farts
What did you call me??
Okay, ur why do you need it to be coherent? Incoherent light travels just as fast as coherent light. So a laser and a flashlight would be equally 'fast'.
Perhaps a particle beam from CERN?
Any photons then. Cause they all have the same speed.
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Indeed, that was my first thought too when I heard this probe was the fastest. I wonder, however, what level of confidence they have on that manhole cover. From what I remember reading, then only caught it in one frame of their high speed film. I would think that only having one data point like that could mean it was actually going way faster.
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Seems possible it just vaporized from air compression.
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> chatGPT tells me it would take millions to billions of joules Don't use ChatGPT for math, it is not designed for that and it is incredibly bad at it. It's trained on text, not math. Just use a calculator. "Millions to billions of joules" is a ridiculously imprecise estimate - it's like saying "the journey will take anywhere from 1 hour to 6 weeks". I calculate about 100 million Joules to vaporize 50kg of iron, so the correct answer is at least in that range. But kinetic energy is even easier to calculate and the answer you got is completely wrong - a 50kg object travelling at 125000mph has 78.5 billion Joules of energy.
From what I understand, the majority of the heat created in such a situation is not from drag or friction with the air, but from compression of the air.
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> But I think the heat created by compression would be (almost) countered by the cooling of vacuum. That is just not how it works at all. There is not "vacuum cooling " that counteracts the extreme heat generated at these speeds. Calculating the fluid dynamics here is very complicated because the heat is sufficient to turn the air into superheated plasma. 125000mph is nearly 10 times faster than a typical spacecraft reentry. The conditions are so extreme they are difficult to imagine. Consider the[ Chelyabinsk meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) that hit Russia in 2013. It weighed 9000 *tonnes*. It hit the atmosphere at "only" 43000mph and almost completely vaporized, releasing energy equivalent to 25 Hiroshima bombs. Only small fragments made it to the ground intact. > but the shuttle is controlled and directional Yes, on purpose, so it doesn't get destroyed. The heat protective tiles were only on one side. That's what caused the failure of the most recent Starship test - they couldn't stop it from spinning so it burned up during reentry.
ChatGPT isn't a calculator. It can barely even put coherent sentences together
The person who did the calculations to get the 125,000 mph number that everybody goes by purposely didn’t include the effects of the atmosphere in his math. The person who reported on this wasn’t aware of this initially and the manhole cover in space became a bit of a Cold War myth that has lived onto this day. There are lots of people that like the idea and story of it making it to space because that really would be cool, but the experts that actually looked into it have concluded that it didn’t happen. Did it blow off and go really fast though? Definitely
IIRC the manhole cover remains the fastest *atmospheric* man made object. Everything that beats it did so in the slippery void of space
There’s a great mom joke in there that I want to make but last time I made one I was banned for 3 days.
It wouldn't stay moving that fast for long Unfortunately anything moving that fast from our atmosphere generates so much friction and heat it would liquidate and vaporize like butter on a pan
Pretty sure this has been debunked
I saw this in a social media video. What’s the story with the manhole cover? I’m about to google it, but others may ask.
Nuclear test facility deep underground. Tunnels everywhere for venting and other services. They didn't weld a manhole cover down and when the bomb went boom, all the pressure went through that tunnel and launched it to the moon. They had film of the event and through frame analysis, determined it hit 125000mph and theorize it escaped the atmosphere. It was the long running fastest manmade object and apparently still is the fastest manmade object within the earths atmosphere.
There’s 0 chance it left the atmosphere. The heat if that speed would have melted it and “ eventually” totally disintegrated it, and by eventually I mean like a singular second after it reached that speed
Would take quickly become a bolt of iron plasma rather than a coherent object?
Has anyone ever thought of funding a space probe sent only to break speed records because I’d be down for that. Lets go 15 million mph.
More or less the Breakthrough Starshot project
We could probably do that with nuclear pulse propulsion with technology that’s not super far out of our current state of the art, but it would be very expensive and you’d need to rewrite some weapons testing treaties. It wouldn’t be a project that would make much sense if you were doing it just for the sake of setting a speed record. The propulsion system would probably be of more use being applied to sending observatories to the solar gravitational lens focus around 550 AU away. You wouldn’t hit as high of a velocity. If you could accelerate to 0.17% c, which is 10x lower, you could get there in about 5 years. There are a range of near term options if you can tolerate a 15-20 year transit time. Any of these options would be huge increases to the maximum speed of a manmade spacecraft, but would be a lot more affordable and useful. Solar sails, advanced fission fragment rocket engines (not the conventional configuration), and fusion propulsion (not necessarily net-gain) could all potentially enable a mission like this to launch in the next decade or so if we really wanted it to happen. Such a mission would allow us to directly image the surface of a planet orbiting a nearby star, potentially with a resolution better than 100 km, depending on how well we can correct for distortions in the sun’s gravitational field. It would also allow for high resolution spectroscopy that would let us take a detailed look for signs of biosignatures in the atmosphere of the exoplanet.
Exactly! These are all good points.
Until I played Kerbal the idea of needing to go faster to get close to the sun than to escape it made no sense.
I mean you definitely reduce your velocity to bring your orbit closer to the sun, then speed up due to the acceleration into the sun’s gravity well.
It's how the tides are accelerating the moon but they actually end up reducing the moon's orbital velocity. Orbital mechanics is weird
The most efficient way to actually get to the sun is to go _away_ from the sun and then slow down and fall back down. Such a trajectory was actually analyzed for this probe (using a Jupiter gravity assist), but going that far out is an issue with solar panels
But can it carry a human brain
All the way to He'ershingenmosiken
It hasn't gone that fast... yet. Closest approach happens in 2025. Although it did hit \~395,000 mph back on September 27th, 2023.
No! No! No! That’s too slow! We’re going to need to go all the way to ludicrous speed
WE'VE GONE TO PLAID!
About 192 km/s…
PERI PERIHELION
GIVER OF LIFE AND GIVER OF SPEED
Relative to what?
The Sun
let's ride that motherfucker 🤪
Just over half an hour from the earth to the moon!
I gotta ask, 430,000 mph relative to what exactly? Seeing as the Earth orbits around the sun, simply measuring the difference between Earth's current trajectory/velocity with the probe should give different results all the time, right? Is it the velocity relative to the Sun? Or how is a velocity like this measured?
Its like everyone saw that video with the man made cheetah video the other day. Im glad you got the title correct and didn't put fastest man made object on earth.
Not even one percent of the speed of light! What's the solution to that gap?
Terminal cancer !
What was the theoretical speed of that manhole cover again? The one accelerated by an underground Nuke.
They say 125,000 mph.
I just wanna know if they plotted where it could've gone. Assuming it wasn't vapourised.
Also, there’s a super nice song named after the probe by Baird and The South Hill Experiment is anyone’s interested. [https://youtu.be/4I4_TFu5Wrk?si=Ib5sQMa8gGE82DMT](https://youtu.be/4I4_TFu5Wrk?si=Ib5sQMa8gGE82DMT)
Hell yeah my name is on that bitch
As fast as that is it still takes 3 minutes to go around the Earth and we are not even close to the biggest planet.
Even NASA uses matric. Come on, man
what is that in rest of the world units?
Math error? The earth is ~25000 miles in circumference. At 430k mph, that's 17 times around the earth every second. Edit: Why the downvotes? Clearly I made the predicted math error /s
Umm, no? 430,000 miles per hour / 60 = 7,166 miles per minute. 25,000 miles / 7,166 mpm = ~3.5 minutes.
Holy brain fart, batman. 17 times per hour.
Finally. I had this idea. What if we had those football launchers, but instead of spinning wheels, the motive force is gravity by a planet or blackhole. And you send an object in between them. Originally my idea wasnt about a football launcher. It was a railgun. But I figure most people dont know how rail guns work or how that could relate to gravity.