Preface
An unremarkable manhole cover soared into the sky, reaching a speed of Mach 206, that is, 26 times the speed of sound, which is converted to about 240,000 km/h in the metric system, reaching an astonishing speed of 1/10,000 of the speed of light, ranking at the top of the world's fastest man-made object list.
In the middle of the flight, it even left behind the closely monitored experimental high-speed camera, leaving only a frame of speeding figure; What's even more bizarre is that people calculated that the speed of the manhole cover exceeded 6 times the speed of the earth's escape, and where it could fly became the happiest thing for the American people at that time, adding a lot of mystery.
Why does the manhole cover fly at such high speed?
In 1957, an experiment was conducted a few hundred meters below the surface of New Mexico, led by the United States. It was a nuclear test, and since the United States was still in the Cold War at the time, the research front for nuclear weapons was very urgent.
To know what was going on, we have to go back to the Cold War period, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were at their peak. At that time, the United States had been stepping up its research and development of nuclear weapons, and the United States had a nuclear test site in New Mexico, known as the Los Alamos laboratory. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the power of a nuclear explosion.
Scientists devised an experiment in which a nuclear device was buried at the bottom of a cave and then exploded, which became known as Pascal A. In this test, the American experiment proved that a nuclear explosion in a cave so far from the surface of the earth's crust would have a great impact on the ground.
The laboratory decided to fulfill the request and arrange for people to reach the test site safely, and they dug a shaft 150 meters deep and 1.2 meters in diameter at the test site. A concrete "hood" with a thickness of about 1.5 meters and a weight of several tons was installed at the top of the shaft. In addition to this, there is a steel plate manhole cover on it.
The Los Alamos lab looked good, but everything turned out to be a disaster for the scientists, because they planned to experiment with a nuclear device with a relatively small explosive yield, but when they buried it at the bottom of the cave, they detonated it and found that the explosive yield of the buried nuclear device was more than 50,000 times that of the nuclear device needed for their experiment.
As a result, to their surprise, the amount of energy it released affected everything on the surface of the earth.
An ordinary manhole cover was subjected to the shock wave and energy generated by the explosion of a nuclear device, and rose directly into the air, this scene is really shocking, if it were not for scientists to film it, I'm afraid no one would believe it, but people will have a lot of questions about it.
The scientists set up an ultra-high-speed photographic device to film the experiment, but during the entire shooting process, the camera only captured a momentary image of the manhole cover. This camera can shoot 1,000 frames per second, but only one frame of manhole cover flying into the sky, so you can imagine how fast it is!
Just when everyone was curious about the speed reached by the manhole cover, the laboratory did not explain much about the content of the experiment, but soon, the news of Pascal B's experiment appeared in front of everyone's eyes, and from the name, it can also be known that this experiment is the same as that carried out by Pascal A, the only difference is a letter.
At that time, the scientists wanted to use this experiment to confirm how fast the manhole cover was flying, and soon after the experiment began, when the manhole cover appeared in front of the scientists' eyes at an unprecedented speed, they were all taken aback.
The manhole cover soared into the sky at a speed of Mach 206, which is about 240,000 km/h in the metric unit of measurement, and this speed can even reach 1/10,000th of the speed of light.
Where do manhole covers go?
Such a high speed will make the manhole cover fly to where it goes, and also make them hope that the manhole cover can break out of the atmosphere and fly into space, at that time there was no object earth escape speed, so as long as the speed reaches a fast enough object, you can break through the atmosphere and come to the road to space.
Some people even imagine that the manhole cover will fly at a speed of Mach 206 all the time in space because there is no resistance, and it will even become a gift from the earth civilization to the aliens, but this is actually impossible.
Although this statement is very amazing, but scientists say it is unlikely, although the concept of the Earth's escape velocity was proposed a few years later, but the impact of this is very large, we all know that as long as the escape velocity is reached, it can break through the atmosphere and reach space, but we did not expect this speed to become the goal of people's competition.
Because if the speed of anything exceeds the speed of the earth's escape, then it will rush directly into space, and there is no air in space and there is no resistance, then as long as there is enough speed, the object can fly all the time, but this is just speculation.
Because scientists say that although the manhole cover is very fast when it is lifted into the air, it is impossible for it to maintain such a high speed after breaking through the atmosphere, but because there is no resistance to slow down, or when it encounters a celestial threat such as planets, or because the material of the manhole cover is not good.
In fact, many people think that if the manhole cover can really break through the atmosphere, then it will be a magical adventure story, but in fact, scientists say that the manhole cover is unlikely to break out of the atmosphere, because it will be affected by the friction of air from the surface during liftoff.
According to scientists, the main component of the manhole cover is steel, and its melting point is about 1500 degrees Celsius, so according to this situation, it is obvious that the manhole cover will melt because of the high temperature from friction.
Despite this, speculation about this never stopped, until the figure of the manhole cover disappeared, whether it flew into space or fell into the ocean, no one knows to this day.
However, the emergence of the Pascal test has become a major opportunity for the United States and other countries to develop nuclear tests, and it has also made people understand the uncertainty in nuclear testing, and once, Germany conducted a nuclear test at home, but due to a calculation error, Germany did not develop nuclear weapons in the end, which also allowed the United States to survive the nuclear crisis safely.