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| ©Reuters: A cameraman films an atomic mushroom cloud during Operation Plumbbob; 19 July 1957 |
Keith Anderson wrote further: "When the US started doing underground nuclear testing, nobody really knew what would happen. One test bomb was placed at the bottom of a 485-foot deep shaft on July 26, 1957, and someone thought it was a good idea to put a half-ton iron manhole cover on top to contain the explosion. The bomb turned the shaft into the world's largest Roman candle, and the manhole cover was nowhere to be found. Robert Brownlee, an astrophysicist who designed the test, wanted to repeat the experiment with high-speed cameras so he could figure out what happened to the cover. So, another experiment was created, this time 500-feet deep, and a similar half-ton manhole cover was placed on top. On August 27, 1957, they detonated the bomb. The high-speed cameras barely caught a view of the cover as it left the top of the shaft and headed into oblivion. Brownlee used the frames to calculate the speed to be more than 125,000 miles per hour; more than five times the escape velocity of the earth, and the fastest man-made object in history."
Physicists have debated the whereabouts of the two manhole covers ever since. Recently, with the help of supercomputers and a lot more scientific knowledge, physicists are certain that they wouldn't have had time to burn up completely before exiting the atmosphere. This means both of the remaining pieces would have passed Pluto's orbit sometime around 1961 and are way beyond the edge of the solar system by now.
You can read two further articles, with beautiful pictures, from MailOnline and BusinessInsider about these amazing phenomena. I have made pdf files of the articles. Click here for article one, and here for article two.
For those who want to know more. The escape speed for Earth is 11,3 kilometre per second. At that speed, one can cover the straight distance between Pretoria and Cape Town (if we take it at 1 315 km) in 116 seconds, or about two minutes. Makes one think about this amazing universe and the achievements of science!
How hard was it to get the Saturn V rocket, 111 m tall and weighing 2,8 million kilograms (click here for more info) to move at 11,3 kilometre per second to take the Apollo 11 crew to the moon in 1969? Nevertheless, Werner von Braun and his team had done it during the Apollo missions! You may want to click the label "von Braun" below this post to read more about Werner von Braun.