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Even at that speed, if we pointed it at the next nearest star (Proxima Centauri), it would still take it 9100 years to get there. This is the fastest object humans have ever created (barring a random manhole cover involved in a nuclear explosion).
>In 1956, Dr Robert Brownlee, from [Los Alamos National Laboratory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory) in [New Mexico](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico), was asked to examine whether nuclear detonations could be conducted underground. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of feet into the sky.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) During the Pascal-B nuclear test,[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) of August 1957,[[9]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-Brownlee,_Harrington-9)[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast even though Brownlee predicted it would not work.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 mi/s; 240,000 km/h; 150,000 mph). The plate was never found.[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10) Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) A high-speed camera, which took one frame per [millisecond](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond), was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) **After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame, but this was enough to make an estimation of its speed.** Dr. Brownlee joked the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence was it was "going like a bat!".[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10) **Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's [escape velocity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity).[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10)**
From Wikipedia.
Blowing shit up and blowing shit up and writing what happened afterwards is the difference of being a kid with 4th of july stolen fireworks and being a scientist
When I was in highschool I was really into mushrooms and how they grew. It fascinated me. We went over it somewhat in biology but it wasn't enough. I really wanted to try to grow some. The only info I could find at the time was on how to grow magic mushrooms. This was years ago. Like 1998. I found a shop o mine and bought a psilocybin cubensis spore print. I told my mom the truth, sort of. I told her I was going to try to grow mushrooms. Yes a 16 year old kid can grow magic mushrooms with ease. Science will just get you in trouble. I'm lucky I didn't get arrested. Shit really got wild once I took chemistry. I learned what pyrodex was and how easy you can fill up CO2 cartridges with it. After many experiments we concluded that 8' is the highest a mailbox will go up into the air off on c02 cartridge full of pyrodex. My brother got into the other side of chemistry and got into learning about birch one pot reduction and p2p. He got arrested.
“…what would happen if we threw particles at each other like really fast?”
“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you…
Why didn’t you mention this before let’s do this shit!”
>However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated
Someone really fucked up their math on the designs, you don't just get 4 orders of magnitude by random noise
They may not have had an accurate way to calculate the yield when they were doing the first nuclear tests, I mean wasn't that part of why they were doing tests in the first place, to study the power of nuclear chain reactions?
Apparently one of the first theories was that the manhole cover achieved escape velocity and was flung out into space. Later they decided it must have been vaporized.
Somewhere in the distant future on some random planet an alien gets killed by a piece of flying metal, making some poor random alien coroner work overtime on a Sunday.
Could be worse. Quantum Field Theory once predicted that empty space contains ~10^35 times more energy than the mass energy of the entire observable universe.
And that’s per cubic centimeter…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
The manhole traveled at 66km/s and reached space before sputnik.
Parker probe has a faster speed relative to the sun but not within atmosphere though !
Alas, it probably didn’t reach space. It’s believed that due to its extreme speed it burnt up in the atmosphere before it reached space, like a meteor in reverse. But it did serve as the inspiration for [Project Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion\)) which proposed the creation of spaceships propelled by riding the shockwave of nuclear bombs detonated behind them, which was simultaneously absurd and yet once you sit down and did the math, actually completely feasible and is bar none the most efficient propulsion system achievable with current technology. Unfortunately due to admittedly quite reasonable concerns about the prospect of spaceships equipped with hundreds of nuclear weapons each it never got off the ground, literally and metaphorically.
There's a ton of YouTube videos out there, but basically, nuclear bomb go boom underground, manhole cover on bunker never seen again, presumably launched at insane speed, possibly even left the planet, if I am remembering right without Googling.
Edit: simple summary - http://www.techinsider.io/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2#but-the-tests-were-interested-in-were-nicknamed-pascal-during-operation-plumbbob-6
The cover was seen in literally one frame of film, the scientist involved has himself revisited the story more than once and it's still unsure whether the cover really left the planet.
> barring a random manhole cover involved in a nuclear explosion
That cover was estimated at 66 km/s. This space craft is travelling at over TWICE that speed. So this may hold the record for fastest.
This is what I came here to discuss. Insanity. I wonder how much "air" resistance it encounters at that speed. Even in a mostly vacuum it has to be feeling something.
Imagine you're traveling down the highway going interstate with no traffic at a decent cruising speed for a straight hour.
Now imagine you travel that same distance you just drove during that hour in one single second instead.
That's as close as I can get to "imagining" how fast that is, and it blows my mind.
Speed is relative though. Earth is traveling at almost 30 km per second relative to the sun and that doesn’t account for the spin. So you might be going pretty fast too relative to the sun when moving and spinning in the same direction.
That's because your brain evolved to hunt animals and plants on the African Savannah, not pilot space ships across the galaxy.
… that last part comes later.
Delta-V means change in velocity. Because speed is mostly maintained once you get going in space, a spacecraft's fuel is measured in its ability to change its velocity. This can mean speeding up your current trajectory, or applying that Delta-V in other directions to either slow down or change your trajectory.
When you want to crash a spacecraft into the sun, you actually have to slow down relative to the sun, as you have to cancel out the velocity that has been applied to the spacecraft by earth's orbit around the sun. Because we're taking about km/s worth of velocity, it requires a lot of Delta-V to get that done. Having a smaller spacecraft and using orbital assists makes it more feasible.
Source: Kerbal Space Program
It should be mentioned that because of some math and science reasons it is actually cheaper to get to the outer solar system, slow down there and then drop into the sun, rather than attempting to do it from our current orbit.
Look at the fire diamond on the bucket. The implication is that it contains some sort of rocket fuel. Tap the image for bonus text, and the big red button below the comic for a bonus panel.
I’m guessing here, but if you don’t slow down, you… miss? And then are flung away by the suns gravity?
(Also, your sourceline gave me the best laugh I’ve had in awhile; Thanks for that)
I'm happy you had a laugh.
There's too many variables for my lay understanding. If you don't slow down enough to hit the sun then you may end up in a different orbit around the sun. You'll probably stay like that until another object gets close enough that it's gravity affects your orbit. I think it's also possible that if you get a close enough miss, that yes you could be flung out of the solar system.
>if you get a close enough miss, that yes you could be flung out of the solar system.
Technically yes.
Your orbit around the sun can pretty much always be described by two variables. If you have a roughly circular orbit around the sun (as you would when escaping from the orbit of earth) and you slow down enough to orbit reeeeally close to the sun on the other side, you still end up roughly where you began, because you accelerate as you fall toward the sun, then decelerate equally as you come up, and your speed at a right angle to the sun doesn't change. Equal up, equal down, with equal distances halfways 'round.
However, let's say efficiency was unnecessary in your particular case. You begin to fire your reaction engine not backwards to help you fall faster (really more, but that's technical), but inwards to change the shape of your orbit. You burn astronomically larger amounts of fuel, but your KE + PE is not decreasing like before. As you change the angle you're traveling at compared to a line coming away from the sun, you change your position on an ellipse, and so you must also change the size of that ellipse. Eventually your perihelion (closest point to the sun) gets very close, and your ellipse's other focus (one is always the sun if you're orbiting of the sun) is so far away it opens up into a parabola, i. e. your orbit has no top. You still have leftover kinetic energy as your potential energy nears it's maximum and you just keep going.
Which is to say, you could maneuver yourself into an escape velocity from a roughly circular orbit, but its distance from the sun at perihelion is not really the main reason. It shapes your escape but doesn't bring your fling.
(And now on second reading you might have been talking about other gravitational bodies also orbiting the sun. In that case just replace the text above with 'Yupp!')
\*golf clap\*
HUSHED NARRATOR: That was a nearly 16 year-old sci-fi referent, given with NO lead-in. Cadd9 sunk the call and response in less than two hours. That's fine redditing.
Dude... Perfect. The Icarus I's beacon is literally my ringtone. Love Sunshine.
Edit. I figured out awards just to hook you up w/ one. Appreciate this reference dude.
It's the [Parker Solar Probe](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe/) for those who are wondering. Named after the scientist who was instrumental in developing our understanding of the sun, and the first living scientist (at the time) with a spacecraft named in their honor.
I can't. I was just bummed when I realized it wasn't the final 14 seconds of the probe's life as it helplessly whirled into a mega tornado of plasma and radiation or whatever
The more I read this thread the more disappointed I become. It’s not touching the sun it’s 4 million miles away. It’s not a death plunge in real time, it’s a sped-up gentle amble. And it wasn’t even done in the daytime!
There's a reason touch was in quotes. There isn't really any hard boundary for the sun, it more or less smoothly transitions from empty space to rare atmosphere to dense atmosphere to raree plasma to dense plasma. There's not really a good spot to point at and claim a thing you can touch. So the outer reaches of the atmosphere is just as valid a point as any other to claim you touched it. Analogous to saying you touched Earth's atmosphere in orbit, except the sun is all atmosphere.
Then you should read up on astronomy a bit. And I don't mean that in a snobby or shitty way. This footage is absolutely phenomenal for what it is.
4 million miles ain't shit in space. It's a lot relative to Earth and our usual frame of reference but in space it's hardly notable at all. It's hundreds of millions to other planets, billions to some.
The Voyager 1 has gone roughly 15 billion miles in over 40yrs of whipping through the solar system at around 38k mph. So about 4 million miles every 4 days or so unless I goofed my math. Fast right?
Voyager 1 has gone approximately a single light DAY in over 40yrs. Our solar system is about 2 light years accross. About 14-28k years for Voyager to leave it.
Space is unfathomable in size and scale and all our frames of reference are a bit confusing because of it. But 4 million miles away from the Sun, relative to...space, is basically hugging the Sun.
These images were captured by the Parker probe's WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument.
All of those streaks the probe is zooming through are coronal streamers – massive loops of electrically charged gas and plasma that connect two regions of opposite polarity on the Sun. They're extended out by the solar wind and they glow like this because they're filled with electrons.
These streamers, also known as helmet streamers, are usually only visible from Earth during an eclipse – but in the footage they're seen as the spacecraft flies above and below them inside the corona.
Take another look and you may notice there are planets visible in the background – [including Earth](https://imgur.com/a/P7MBo86)!
Parker Solar Probe was moving at speeds of up to a phenomenal 147 kilometers per second or 529,200 kilometers per hour (that's around 91 miles per second or 328,830 miles per hour) – you can watch the speed being clocked on the bottom left of the footage.
[Source](https://www.sciencealert.com/the-footage-from-the-first-spacecraft-to-fly-through-the-sun-s-corona-is-insane)
The smoky background is gas being ejected by the Sun. There's also the Milky Way, stars and planets (couple bright dots).
The streaks are cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor and exciting the pixels, most of them come straight from the Sun.
Thank you for putting touched in quotes.
While touch is a loose term being used. The Parker probe is around 4 million miles from the sun and is estimated to come as close as 3.8 million miles. While still in the millions this is the first time we have been able to get a probe this close to the sun in order to record data.
The probe has entered the suns corona and that’s insane. 3.8 million miles is a long ways from touching but I’ll be damned if that’s not close enough haha.
I don’t know exactly what’s used on the probe but there are certain techniques like [Signal Averaging](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_averaging) that allow us to receive signal below the noise floor (And sun just makes the noise floor very very high).
Stuff like this is just incomprehensible gibberish to me, yet I still find it fascinating for whatever reason.
Clicking on the Wikipedia never ever helps me if it’s a space topic. I understand like 1% of the article, which consists of fillers like “and”, and “like”. I get the basic general idea of the topic, but that’s it.
Hopefully I can explain:
noise is random, your signal isn't.
If you record over a longer period of time, plain noise should just be 'flat' (or some other semi-predictable pattern related to the noise source) as the signal averages out.
If through all that time, you repeatedly send your signal, then it'll start to stand out from that noise, because while the noise averages out, your signal doesn't.
If you imagine an analogy of a camera and a light: you could make a light brighter in a photo by either using a bigger bulb (more powerful antenna), a more sensitive camera (bigger recieving dish), or leaving the bulb on and having a longer exposure (signal averaging).
They will outlast our civilisation.
100,000 years from now when our civilisation is being excavated all they will know about us is we were bodaciously excellent at snake.
i.......forgot how fucking big the sun is. just did some Googling, if anyone else is curious:
- the ozone is between 10-25 miles away from Earth's surface
- Earth's diameter is about 7,917 miles
feeling extremely small at the mome
So, without sleep or rest, it would take you about 2000 hours.
2000 hours is about 83 days.
So whether or not you start now, please remember to !remindme in 84 days
It contains most of the mass of our system.
And as far as stars go it isn't even that big. Look up a size comparison video of stars. I suggest kurzgesagt.
Fun Fact: The Sun's Corona is much hotter than the "surface" of it. The corona goes into the order of magnitude of a million degrees Celsius in localized areas
eh but the density is really low there
the earth atmosphere technically gets really hot way up above the stratosphere as well but the density is lower than the best vacuum we can produce
a particular definition of temperature being connected with the average kinetic energy of particles leads to such results
NASA: So what did we learn about the sun this time?
Scientist: I don’t know it’s the fucking sun. It’s as hot this time as it was the last time we got close to it.
There’s an easier way to land on the sun station by using the black hole tower on Ash Twin, but if you’re good you can skim your ship along the surface of the sun and land on it yourself.
The moment you said 'sun station' i immediately thought of Outer Wilds, and that's exactly what you're referencing. Currently playing this amazing game and loving every bit of it
The fact that the plasma surrounding the probe looks like bad CGI is absolutely wild to me, like bro, imagine being at such high temperatures that the fucking movies look more real that the real thing
I’ll sue the sun for all of my expenses since I was born, since it has been forcing vitamin D on me whenever I see it. Not only that, but it has been stalking me and following me whenever I go outside.
Can’t wait to not see it in court
Parker solar Probe is orbiting the sun very closely. One year ago it got so close, it entered what's called the solar corona. Think about it like the sun's atmosphere but it's made out of hot hot plasma. All the particles floating around are charged particles getting blown away becoming solar wind
Fun fact: The most outer layer of the sun is hotter than the volume below it. I believe the outside is some ridiculously hot temperature (millions of C°) and the surface is much cooler at only 6 000°C, inclining in temperature the higher the elevation. Then below the surface it is hot as fuckkk. So there's some neat phenomenon that causes that temperature gradient, I believe it's mostly ambiguous rn, but I'm sure there's solid theories on the causes
Makes me think of how you can swipe your hand through the body of a flame and not feel much heat but if you swipe your hand over the peak of the flame it’s much hotter.
[Here's a youtube video explaining exactly what is happening by nasa themselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkaLfbuB_6E). It's quick short and worth a watch if you want to understand more of what is happening in this gif.
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140 kilometers per second. I cannot fathom it.
Even at that speed, if we pointed it at the next nearest star (Proxima Centauri), it would still take it 9100 years to get there. This is the fastest object humans have ever created (barring a random manhole cover involved in a nuclear explosion).
Sorry, can you expand on that nuclear manhole cover? Edit: thanks, guys. We're all good here.
>In 1956, Dr Robert Brownlee, from [Los Alamos National Laboratory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory) in [New Mexico](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico), was asked to examine whether nuclear detonations could be conducted underground. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of feet into the sky.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) During the Pascal-B nuclear test,[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) of August 1957,[[9]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-Brownlee,_Harrington-9)[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast even though Brownlee predicted it would not work.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 mi/s; 240,000 km/h; 150,000 mph). The plate was never found.[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10) Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) A high-speed camera, which took one frame per [millisecond](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond), was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting.[[8]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-register-8) **After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame, but this was enough to make an estimation of its speed.** Dr. Brownlee joked the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence was it was "going like a bat!".[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10) **Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's [escape velocity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity).[[10]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_note-brownlee-10)** From Wikipedia.
Oh, cool. I thought it was this person's pet theory and didn't think to google it. Cheers.
Because it was deemed "scientifically interesting" lmao. "This is gonna be sick, watch"
As a scientist, that’s exactly how it works.
Blowing shit up and blowing shit up and writing what happened afterwards is the difference of being a kid with 4th of july stolen fireworks and being a scientist
Remember, kids, the difference between screwing around and science is writing it all down. -Adam Savage
When I was in highschool I was really into mushrooms and how they grew. It fascinated me. We went over it somewhat in biology but it wasn't enough. I really wanted to try to grow some. The only info I could find at the time was on how to grow magic mushrooms. This was years ago. Like 1998. I found a shop o mine and bought a psilocybin cubensis spore print. I told my mom the truth, sort of. I told her I was going to try to grow mushrooms. Yes a 16 year old kid can grow magic mushrooms with ease. Science will just get you in trouble. I'm lucky I didn't get arrested. Shit really got wild once I took chemistry. I learned what pyrodex was and how easy you can fill up CO2 cartridges with it. After many experiments we concluded that 8' is the highest a mailbox will go up into the air off on c02 cartridge full of pyrodex. My brother got into the other side of chemistry and got into learning about birch one pot reduction and p2p. He got arrested.
“…what would happen if we threw particles at each other like really fast?” “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you… Why didn’t you mention this before let’s do this shit!”
"If you write it down, it's science!"
Basically like the beginning of JPL lol
>However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated Someone really fucked up their math on the designs, you don't just get 4 orders of magnitude by random noise
They may not have had an accurate way to calculate the yield when they were doing the first nuclear tests, I mean wasn't that part of why they were doing tests in the first place, to study the power of nuclear chain reactions?
This was 1956 at least, a full decade and change after the first nuclear tests.
Yes, but this was one of the first *thermonuclear* tests, which is a whole other ballgame
I'm sure in 2022 you can get plutonium in any corner drug store, but in 1956 it's a little hard to come by
"Doc, you don't just walk into a store a-and.. ..and buy plutonium!" —Marty McFly, 1985, Twin Pines Mall
*Lone Pine Mall
Forgot to carry the 1.
Apparently one of the first theories was that the manhole cover achieved escape velocity and was flung out into space. Later they decided it must have been vaporized.
The mere fact that a theory of where the manhole cover went is "I dunno, outer space" is hilarious to me.
Somewhere in the distant future on some random planet an alien gets killed by a piece of flying metal, making some poor random alien coroner work overtime on a Sunday.
Or better yet, we get invaded because Earth attacked an alien civilization, with a manhole cover.
Alien coroner: I'm not even supposed to be here today!
Is us throwing that into space still a theory? Or was it basically debunked? Idk why but I love the idea of it getting shot into orbit
Not orbit lol, 6 times escape velocity. They thought that thing was off to visit the aliens.
Off by a mere multiple of 50,000 !
Could be worse. Quantum Field Theory once predicted that empty space contains ~10^35 times more energy than the mass energy of the entire observable universe. And that’s per cubic centimeter…
The fuck did they do? Did they drop a negative and turn a 10^-50 into a 10^50 somehow?
It's not clear that the thing they calculate was the same thing that we measure
So it wasn't faster then? 66 km/s, not even close to 140 km/s. Or am I missing something?
It will have been still accelerating during the one frame they managed to capture. They can only estimate via calculation what its final speed was
I say we try it again with a much bigger nuke, a bigger manhole cover, and a wider view angle.
That was a really interesting read. Thank you.
First contact, is this heavy spherical object yours? It slammed into our planet and destroyed a small village.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob The manhole traveled at 66km/s and reached space before sputnik. Parker probe has a faster speed relative to the sun but not within atmosphere though !
Alas, it probably didn’t reach space. It’s believed that due to its extreme speed it burnt up in the atmosphere before it reached space, like a meteor in reverse. But it did serve as the inspiration for [Project Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion\)) which proposed the creation of spaceships propelled by riding the shockwave of nuclear bombs detonated behind them, which was simultaneously absurd and yet once you sit down and did the math, actually completely feasible and is bar none the most efficient propulsion system achievable with current technology. Unfortunately due to admittedly quite reasonable concerns about the prospect of spaceships equipped with hundreds of nuclear weapons each it never got off the ground, literally and metaphorically.
The science fiction book Footfall deals with spacecraft powered in this manner. Fun book.
[V2 rockets also reached space before Sputnik.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MW_18014) However, Sputnik was the first thing humans put into orbit.
There's a ton of YouTube videos out there, but basically, nuclear bomb go boom underground, manhole cover on bunker never seen again, presumably launched at insane speed, possibly even left the planet, if I am remembering right without Googling. Edit: simple summary - http://www.techinsider.io/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2#but-the-tests-were-interested-in-were-nicknamed-pascal-during-operation-plumbbob-6 The cover was seen in literally one frame of film, the scientist involved has himself revisited the story more than once and it's still unsure whether the cover really left the planet.
The likeliest outcome is that it vaporized into a plasma almost instantaneously. Frictional heating with the atmosphere would have been astronomical.
Oh shit it says per second hahah. I was wondering why we were amazed over 140km/h
Aye, more like 500,000km/h :D
> barring a random manhole cover involved in a nuclear explosion That cover was estimated at 66 km/s. This space craft is travelling at over TWICE that speed. So this may hold the record for fastest.
This is what I came here to discuss. Insanity. I wonder how much "air" resistance it encounters at that speed. Even in a mostly vacuum it has to be feeling something.
Sun resistance? Plasma resistance perhaps.
That's why I put air in quotations.
You put air in air quotes. ... I'll see myself out.
Imagine you're traveling down the highway going interstate with no traffic at a decent cruising speed for a straight hour. Now imagine you travel that same distance you just drove during that hour in one single second instead. That's as close as I can get to "imagining" how fast that is, and it blows my mind.
That’s getting close to teleportation
Speed is relative though. Earth is traveling at almost 30 km per second relative to the sun and that doesn’t account for the spin. So you might be going pretty fast too relative to the sun when moving and spinning in the same direction.
[удалено]
Everything about astronomy breaks my brain.
That's because your brain evolved to hunt animals and plants on the African Savannah, not pilot space ships across the galaxy. … that last part comes later.
Not naming this spacecraft “Icarus” is a wasted opportunity.
We didn't want it to die when it was close to but not touching the sun
Daedalus then?
Daeddylus
Daddylust
Bruh
I'm certain they're saving that name for a spacecraft they're willing to plunge directly into the sun
Gonna need a lot of Δv.
Is that shortcut for sunscreen?
Delta-V means change in velocity. Because speed is mostly maintained once you get going in space, a spacecraft's fuel is measured in its ability to change its velocity. This can mean speeding up your current trajectory, or applying that Delta-V in other directions to either slow down or change your trajectory. When you want to crash a spacecraft into the sun, you actually have to slow down relative to the sun, as you have to cancel out the velocity that has been applied to the spacecraft by earth's orbit around the sun. Because we're taking about km/s worth of velocity, it requires a lot of Delta-V to get that done. Having a smaller spacecraft and using orbital assists makes it more feasible. Source: Kerbal Space Program
Many Jebs died, to bring us this information.
It should be mentioned that because of some math and science reasons it is actually cheaper to get to the outer solar system, slow down there and then drop into the sun, rather than attempting to do it from our current orbit.
(https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/delta-v) [Relevant Comic]
It says there is no comic with this ID Edit: ok the link works now. Unfortunately I don't get it.
Look at the fire diamond on the bucket. The implication is that it contains some sort of rocket fuel. Tap the image for bonus text, and the big red button below the comic for a bonus panel.
I guess to rocket scientist delta v is derived from the rocket fuel, and she's holding a bucket of some.
I’m guessing here, but if you don’t slow down, you… miss? And then are flung away by the suns gravity? (Also, your sourceline gave me the best laugh I’ve had in awhile; Thanks for that)
I'm happy you had a laugh. There's too many variables for my lay understanding. If you don't slow down enough to hit the sun then you may end up in a different orbit around the sun. You'll probably stay like that until another object gets close enough that it's gravity affects your orbit. I think it's also possible that if you get a close enough miss, that yes you could be flung out of the solar system.
>if you get a close enough miss, that yes you could be flung out of the solar system. Technically yes. Your orbit around the sun can pretty much always be described by two variables. If you have a roughly circular orbit around the sun (as you would when escaping from the orbit of earth) and you slow down enough to orbit reeeeally close to the sun on the other side, you still end up roughly where you began, because you accelerate as you fall toward the sun, then decelerate equally as you come up, and your speed at a right angle to the sun doesn't change. Equal up, equal down, with equal distances halfways 'round. However, let's say efficiency was unnecessary in your particular case. You begin to fire your reaction engine not backwards to help you fall faster (really more, but that's technical), but inwards to change the shape of your orbit. You burn astronomically larger amounts of fuel, but your KE + PE is not decreasing like before. As you change the angle you're traveling at compared to a line coming away from the sun, you change your position on an ellipse, and so you must also change the size of that ellipse. Eventually your perihelion (closest point to the sun) gets very close, and your ellipse's other focus (one is always the sun if you're orbiting of the sun) is so far away it opens up into a parabola, i. e. your orbit has no top. You still have leftover kinetic energy as your potential energy nears it's maximum and you just keep going. Which is to say, you could maneuver yourself into an escape velocity from a roughly circular orbit, but its distance from the sun at perihelion is not really the main reason. It shapes your escape but doesn't bring your fling. (And now on second reading you might have been talking about other gravitational bodies also orbiting the sun. In that case just replace the text above with 'Yupp!')
Kaneda, What do you see??
Great film
##KANEDA. WHAT DO YOU SEE‽
\*golf clap\* HUSHED NARRATOR: That was a nearly 16 year-old sci-fi referent, given with NO lead-in. Cadd9 sunk the call and response in less than two hours. That's fine redditing.
Only dream I ever have, is it the surface of the sun? Every time I shut my eyes it’s always the same.
Icarus… who is the fifth crew member?
Dude... Perfect. The Icarus I's beacon is literally my ringtone. Love Sunshine. Edit. I figured out awards just to hook you up w/ one. Appreciate this reference dude.
Not naming the spacecraft in the title is peak Reddit.
It's the [Parker Solar Probe](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe/) for those who are wondering. Named after the scientist who was instrumental in developing our understanding of the sun, and the first living scientist (at the time) with a spacecraft named in their honor.
For anyone that didn't notice, this is 4 days sped up
I literally have no idea what I'm looking at. Care to explain the footage?
I can't. I was just bummed when I realized it wasn't the final 14 seconds of the probe's life as it helplessly whirled into a mega tornado of plasma and radiation or whatever
You have a way with words my dude
Or whatever
"Or whatever" is great for making sure you've covered all the bases... Or whatever...
The more I read this thread the more disappointed I become. It’s not touching the sun it’s 4 million miles away. It’s not a death plunge in real time, it’s a sped-up gentle amble. And it wasn’t even done in the daytime!
There's a reason touch was in quotes. There isn't really any hard boundary for the sun, it more or less smoothly transitions from empty space to rare atmosphere to dense atmosphere to raree plasma to dense plasma. There's not really a good spot to point at and claim a thing you can touch. So the outer reaches of the atmosphere is just as valid a point as any other to claim you touched it. Analogous to saying you touched Earth's atmosphere in orbit, except the sun is all atmosphere.
Technically, nothing is ever really touching anything
You poked my heart
Then you should read up on astronomy a bit. And I don't mean that in a snobby or shitty way. This footage is absolutely phenomenal for what it is. 4 million miles ain't shit in space. It's a lot relative to Earth and our usual frame of reference but in space it's hardly notable at all. It's hundreds of millions to other planets, billions to some. The Voyager 1 has gone roughly 15 billion miles in over 40yrs of whipping through the solar system at around 38k mph. So about 4 million miles every 4 days or so unless I goofed my math. Fast right? Voyager 1 has gone approximately a single light DAY in over 40yrs. Our solar system is about 2 light years accross. About 14-28k years for Voyager to leave it. Space is unfathomable in size and scale and all our frames of reference are a bit confusing because of it. But 4 million miles away from the Sun, relative to...space, is basically hugging the Sun.
Hey it’s ok, I love all things space. I was just joking.
Oh sorry lol it was 6am and I love gushing about distances and sizes in space 😅 it's just such a specific interest I rarely get to goob out about it.
These images were captured by the Parker probe's WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument. All of those streaks the probe is zooming through are coronal streamers – massive loops of electrically charged gas and plasma that connect two regions of opposite polarity on the Sun. They're extended out by the solar wind and they glow like this because they're filled with electrons. These streamers, also known as helmet streamers, are usually only visible from Earth during an eclipse – but in the footage they're seen as the spacecraft flies above and below them inside the corona. Take another look and you may notice there are planets visible in the background – [including Earth](https://imgur.com/a/P7MBo86)! Parker Solar Probe was moving at speeds of up to a phenomenal 147 kilometers per second or 529,200 kilometers per hour (that's around 91 miles per second or 328,830 miles per hour) – you can watch the speed being clocked on the bottom left of the footage. [Source](https://www.sciencealert.com/the-footage-from-the-first-spacecraft-to-fly-through-the-sun-s-corona-is-insane)
The smoky background is gas being ejected by the Sun. There's also the Milky Way, stars and planets (couple bright dots). The streaks are cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor and exciting the pixels, most of them come straight from the Sun.
[удалено]
Bullshit, you can clearly see daylight throughout the video
Thank you for putting touched in quotes. While touch is a loose term being used. The Parker probe is around 4 million miles from the sun and is estimated to come as close as 3.8 million miles. While still in the millions this is the first time we have been able to get a probe this close to the sun in order to record data. The probe has entered the suns corona and that’s insane. 3.8 million miles is a long ways from touching but I’ll be damned if that’s not close enough haha.
I wonder how it was able to transmit data in such an intense environment. Crazy and very cool video feed.
I don’t know exactly what’s used on the probe but there are certain techniques like [Signal Averaging](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_averaging) that allow us to receive signal below the noise floor (And sun just makes the noise floor very very high).
Stuff like this is just incomprehensible gibberish to me, yet I still find it fascinating for whatever reason. Clicking on the Wikipedia never ever helps me if it’s a space topic. I understand like 1% of the article, which consists of fillers like “and”, and “like”. I get the basic general idea of the topic, but that’s it.
Hopefully I can explain: noise is random, your signal isn't. If you record over a longer period of time, plain noise should just be 'flat' (or some other semi-predictable pattern related to the noise source) as the signal averages out. If through all that time, you repeatedly send your signal, then it'll start to stand out from that noise, because while the noise averages out, your signal doesn't. If you imagine an analogy of a camera and a light: you could make a light brighter in a photo by either using a bigger bulb (more powerful antenna), a more sensitive camera (bigger recieving dish), or leaving the bulb on and having a longer exposure (signal averaging).
Thanks!
Yeah, really got to appreciate people who take their time to politely explain something, especially in these days.
It has an old Nokia brick phone powering it, virtually indestructible
3310
Do not cite the old magic to me, witch. I was there when it was written.
They will outlast our civilisation. 100,000 years from now when our civilisation is being excavated all they will know about us is we were bodaciously excellent at snake.
theyll find the nokias and that one bag of hot cheetos
I realize the best way to deny an alien invasion, and by extension our space travel as well, would be to scatter some 3310's into orbit.
That'll be catastrophic if one reenters the atmosphere.
i.......forgot how fucking big the sun is. just did some Googling, if anyone else is curious: - the ozone is between 10-25 miles away from Earth's surface - Earth's diameter is about 7,917 miles feeling extremely small at the mome
Agreed this is a scary reminder. Just to add another: - the moon is only 238,900 miles away
That’s like one Toyota.
those things really do go places.
You asked for it? You got it.
With an oil change it could even make it back
And all the planets in our system fit inbetween
Don't compare yourself with others. You are big enough, you are gargantuan.
It's kind crazier because it's totally feasible to walk 1 mile in a fairly short amount of time ~15 minutes, so 7,917 miles isnt really that large.
So, without sleep or rest, it would take you about 2000 hours. 2000 hours is about 83 days. So whether or not you start now, please remember to !remindme in 84 days
It contains most of the mass of our system. And as far as stars go it isn't even that big. Look up a size comparison video of stars. I suggest kurzgesagt.
Fun Fact: The Sun's Corona is much hotter than the "surface" of it. The corona goes into the order of magnitude of a million degrees Celsius in localized areas
eh but the density is really low there the earth atmosphere technically gets really hot way up above the stratosphere as well but the density is lower than the best vacuum we can produce a particular definition of temperature being connected with the average kinetic energy of particles leads to such results
Thank you for adding a bit of context
Yes, technically I've touched my crush.
NASA: So what did we learn about the sun this time? Scientist: I don’t know it’s the fucking sun. It’s as hot this time as it was the last time we got close to it.
What are all the streaks in the video?
I am quite sure it's radiation.
and i can’t get service in the basement
NASA should make their own Wi-Fi routers and sell them
There's might be less material between whatever satellite is picking up the signal from this and between your router and your basement tbh.
Looks like they did it at night, it would have been cooler.
Agreed. The sun is more susceptible to being photographed when it’s sleeping. Idk why they didn’t think this shit through.
This is why I am the science type person and they are just rocket scientists.
At night its called The Moon.
The Moon is made of cheese. How could this possibly be the Moon? Let that sink in.
No, the moon is just the back of the sun!
The sun is yellow, cheese is yellow, the moon is made of cheese, therefore the sun is the moon.
Get out. Now. I will not have open displays of logic on a science discussion.
Everyone knows that the moon is a dragon egg. It is known
Or to the dark side of the sun
Sensor data was recorded as saying “oooh ooh ow hot hot hot hot hot!”
The official statement released based on an accumulation of all available data was WOWEE ZOWEEEEEEE
WTF is that the Milky Way?
Yes
I just saw the actual video and this one looks heavily processed compared to it.
No no, I believe it is a 3 Musketeers
There’s an easier way to land on the sun station by using the black hole tower on Ash Twin, but if you’re good you can skim your ship along the surface of the sun and land on it yourself.
The moment you said 'sun station' i immediately thought of Outer Wilds, and that's exactly what you're referencing. Currently playing this amazing game and loving every bit of it
Best game ever.
What game?
Outer Wilds
Is that the sort of borderlands like space game? Or am I completely wrong
You're referring to Outer Worlds, I think. Outer Wilds is very different but also very good
It is the best game you have never played
Ah, I see. Thanks for that, I’ll check it out
It's absolutely terrifying, I still get cosmic fear thinking about it
only 3.8% of players on steam have the achievment for that and it makes me feel proud to be among them.
I yeeted myself into the sun far too many times trying to fly to that structure. Never managed it.
The fact that the plasma surrounding the probe looks like bad CGI is absolutely wild to me, like bro, imagine being at such high temperatures that the fucking movies look more real that the real thing
It’s four days of footage, it probably looks less fake in real time
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
We basically Facebook poked the sun.
yesterday I made one comment about poking on Facebook not being much of a thing anymore and now I’m seeing this shit everywhere lol
We’ll if we don’t see ya later, good morning, afternoon, and good night!
Are the 4 bright dots planets?
They are planets! https://twitter.com/SungrazerComets/status/1471213042272714753?t=etIDCCRlYh-gdJiA12ycAg&s=19
Pretty wild
Was it consensual?
The sun has pretty much been groping us with radiation since our planet was born. I would go as far to say the sun is a groomer
I feel violated
I’ll sue the sun for all of my expenses since I was born, since it has been forcing vitamin D on me whenever I see it. Not only that, but it has been stalking me and following me whenever I go outside. Can’t wait to not see it in court
Solar Harrasment
Can someone eli5 what I’m seeing here?
Parker solar Probe is orbiting the sun very closely. One year ago it got so close, it entered what's called the solar corona. Think about it like the sun's atmosphere but it's made out of hot hot plasma. All the particles floating around are charged particles getting blown away becoming solar wind
I watched this for like 3 mins before realizing it was looping
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries
Fun fact: The most outer layer of the sun is hotter than the volume below it. I believe the outside is some ridiculously hot temperature (millions of C°) and the surface is much cooler at only 6 000°C, inclining in temperature the higher the elevation. Then below the surface it is hot as fuckkk. So there's some neat phenomenon that causes that temperature gradient, I believe it's mostly ambiguous rn, but I'm sure there's solid theories on the causes
Makes me think of how you can swipe your hand through the body of a flame and not feel much heat but if you swipe your hand over the peak of the flame it’s much hotter.
Bonus fact: it costs more energy to reach the sun from Earth than to leave the solar system from Earth.
“Below the surface is hot as fuckkk” - going to cite you in a science paper.
*Fuel Scooping*
*warning, temperature critical*
*Heatsink deployed*
140km/s. Fuck me that’s fast.
The only thing faster is a toddler after you ask them "hey what is that you have in your mouth?"
[Here's a youtube video explaining exactly what is happening by nasa themselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkaLfbuB_6E). It's quick short and worth a watch if you want to understand more of what is happening in this gif.
Kaneda- what do you see?
We can get a video transmitted from the fuckin sun, but I can’t get any cell service at work
It’s not difficult if they do this at night time
It was a good idea they went in the night not the day.
My name was on that one!! There was a whole thing they did just give them your first and last name and they put it on craft and shot it at the Sun
Turns out all you had to do was send it to the sun at night.