2y ago

The fastest ever human-made object keeps breaking its own speed record

www.popsci.com

The Parker Solar Probe's new top speed could get you from NYC to LA in just 20 seconds. It's not done yet.

43 comments

Just remember not to try and impress a girl back on Ceres by trying to slingshot through the ring.
RIP
- Full. Stop.
  
  Speed never killed anyone. Stopping quickly - that’s what gets you.
  
  I wonder if his teeth were moving fast enough to cause a problem for the integrity of the hull
- HATE when tha happenz
  
  Fa real, sa sa ke?
  Edit: oye kopeng, don't forget check ya seals an filters
  
  Ah yes. And the epic Kenny Roger’s song “The Slow Zone” playing in the background.
- RIP Manéo Jung-Espino—
Breaking news: The thing we put in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun is in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun (and hasn't yet reached its perihelion).
- More at ten
My butt is orbiting the center of our galaxy at around 500K mph so that thing still has some ways to go.
- I'm so glad somone said this, the title of this article is as if a child wrote it and has no concept of relativity.
  
  Well is the article not implying that the it's a speed of a man-made object relative to us on earth?
  "WeLl AkShUlLy!!?" You're just being a pedant.
I'm theory, the previous record holder is actually a particular man hole cover involved in operation plumbbum. Some napkin math put it at somewhere around 37 miles per second. A high speed camera pointed at it only caught one or two frames of moment.
- The related Wikipedia page, in case anyone else was curious
- Ah yes, the manhole cover made in Neenah, Wisconsin. Probably the furthest man made object from Earth at this point for sure.
  
  Probably the furthest man made object from Earth at this point for sure.
  The article says "Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere."
  
  This, and Chris Waddle’s penalty kick for England against West Germany in the 1990 World Cup semi final.
  
  It's unlikely it kept it though the atmosphere. But it's possible it was traveling so fast it didn't even have time to vaporize.
It's too bad they can't fling the probe in the opposite direction once it's done with the sun. I know it's instruments are probably tuned specifically to take measurements of various solar phenomenon from close-up and probably aren't sensitive enough to be useful for any deep space science, but it'd be cool to use that speed to launch it on an escape trajectory and see how long it takes to catch up to the Voyager probes.
- PSP is travelling at 394,736mph. Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles away and travelling at about 35,000mph.
  Time taken to catch up t is roughly 394736t = 15000000000 +35000t or about 4.75 years.
  
  Thanks for the math! Here's hoping we can fling the records of our civilisation far enough out for another civilisation to learn about our demise. And not, like, just accidentally flinging it into a burning star or space imperialist Klingons or something. Even though that would be poetically appropriate too.
  
  So like .06% of light speed?
- So, it doesn't work the way you think.
  It's only going that fast because it's near the sun. The same way a satellite close to Earth needs to move faster than one farther away. You can't really use that velocity to go elsewhere. It had to lose a lot of energy to get as close to the sun as it is. It would need to gain that back to get to earth.
  I'm really blanking on a way to explain this concisely and I can't explain orbital mechanics in a Lemmy post.
  If you play Kerbal space program, you can definitely use that to get a very intuitive understanding of this concept.
  
  Drop a ball. It goes fastest just before and after it hits the ground, and slows down until it gets back to near the height you dropped it from
  The probe is the ball, and slingshotting around the sun is like bouncing off the ground. The potential energy (height of ball/distance from sun) gets converted to and from kinetic energy (speed).
  
  Thanks! I didn't think about the fact that it'd lose velocity to gravity as it gets further away.
  I wonder if you could slingshot a probe by firing it to fly by the sun and then shedding mass at its perihelion. The idea being that the craft would be mostly dead weight, increasing the force exerted on the craft by the sun's gravitational pull. Once you reach the perihelion, you eject the mass behind the craft so that there's less force acting on the craft as it moves away from the sun.
Well yeah, that's how orbits work. You accelerate down to your periapse, the closest point to the body you're orbiting, then slow down on the way up to your apoapse, the furthest point. Thus the probe will keep accelerating until it gets to its closest point to the sun.
- Thanks, Jimmy Neutron

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