The brainchild of one ambitious American astrophysicist during the course of U.S. nuclear tests yielded the first manmade object in Earth’s orbit. The four foot round steel cap was launched into orbit in late August 1957 by the United States, beating the USSR’s Sputnik 1 to orbit by one month and nine days, scoring a major victory in the space race for the Americans. This feat has gone largely unrecognized by most historians. //
Operators
United States – Originally launched from the Nevada Test Site in 1957, the Pascal B Cap remains in service in Earth’s orbit despite its unknown location. //
A manhole cover launched into space with a nuclear test is the fastest human-made object. A scientist on Operation Plumbbob told us the unbelievable story. //
Robert Brownlee was on the Operation Plumbbob team that launched an object in space before Sputnik.
They put a manhole cover above a nuke underground, and the explosion shot the iron cap into space.
The fastest human-made object was part of the US government's nuclear testing in the 1950s.
But the very first underground nuclear tests were a bit of an experiment — nobody knew exactly what might happen.
The first one, nicknamed "Uncle," exploded beneath the Nevada Test Site on November 29, 1951.
Uncle was a code for "underground."
It was only buried 17 feet, but the top of the bomb's mushroom cloud exploded 11,500 feet into the sky. //
The underground nuclear tests we're interested in were nicknamed "Pascal," during Operation Plumbbob in 1957. //
Brownlee said he designed the Pascal-A test as the first that aimed to contain nuclear fallout. The bomb was placed at the bottom of a hollow column — 3 feet wide and 485 feet deep — with a 4-inch-thick iron cap on top.
The test was conducted on the night of July 26, 1957, so the explosion coming out of the column looked like a Roman candle. //
Brownlee wanted to measure how fast the iron cap flew off the column, so he designed a second experiment, Pascal-B, and got an incredible calculation. //
Brownlee replicated the first experiment, but the column in Pascal-B was deeper at 500 feet. They also recorded the experiment with a camera that shot one frame per millisecond.
On August 27, 1957, the "manhole cover" cap flew off the column with the force of the nuclear explosion. The iron cover was only partially visible in one frame, Brownlee said.
When he used this information to find out how fast the cap was going, Brownlee calculated it was traveling at five times the escape velocity of the Earth — or about 125,000 miles per hour. //
Pascal-B's estimated iron cover speed dwarfs the 36,373 mph that the New Horizons spacecraft — which many have called the fastest object launched by humankind — eventually reached while traveling toward Pluto. //
"After I was in the business and did my own missile launches," he told Insider in 2016, "I realized that that piece of iron didn't have time to burn all the way up [in the atmosphere]."
Mere months after the Pascal tests, October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. While the USSR was the first to launch a satellite, Brownlee was probably the first to launch an object into space. ///
Now exceeded by the Parker Solar Probe...
At its closest approach [to the sun] in 2024, its speed relative to the Sun was 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph) or 191 km/s (118.7 mi/s), which is 0.064% the speed of light.[7][9] It is the fastest object ever built on Earth.[
An algorithm can spot beaver ponds from satellite imagery. //
Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state. //
According to Fairfax, EEAGER’s use cases are many. The model could be used to estimate beaver numbers, monitor population trends, and calculate beaver-provided ecosystem services like water storage and fire prevention. It could help states figure out where to reintroduce beavers, where to target stream and wetland restoration, and where to create conservation areas. It could allow researchers to track beavers’ spread in the Arctic as the rodents move north with climate change; or their movements in South America, where beavers were introduced in the 1940s and have since proliferated. “We literally cannot handle all the requests we’re getting,” says Fairfax, who serves as EEAGER’s scientific adviser.
Laser communications, an ever so important factor for the future of space exploration, has seen some important steps forward recently. Two test missions are on the way to provide important information, and a third one is planned for next year. //
Like using a laser pointer to track a moving dime from a mile away, aiming a laser beam over millions of miles requires extremely precise “pointing.” So, the transceiver must be isolated from the spacecraft vibrations, which would otherwise nudge the laser beam off target.
The demonstration also needs to compensate for the time it takes for light to travel from the spacecraft to Earth over vast distances. In the first DSOC test, the near-infrared photons took about 50 seconds to travel from the probe to Earth. Once the probe arrives at the asteroid, the transmission time will be extended to 20 minutes. In that time, both the spacecraft and the planet will have moved, and the uplink and downlink lasers will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Designed to study Pluto, the spacecraft’s instruments are being repurposed. //
New Horizons is now nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, the outer planets are receding fast, and interstellar space is illuminated by the vast swath of the Milky Way ahead. But the spacecraft’s research is far from over. Its instruments are all functioning and responsive, and the New Horizons team has been working hard, pushing the spacecraft’s capabilities to carry out new tasks. //
In 2021, his team photographed a dark patch of sky and digitally removed all known light sources in the Universe. What remained—the estimated COB—is roughly twice as bright as expected. “Our test field was far from the Milky Way, bright stars, dust clouds—anything that would wash out the fragile darkness of the Universe, yet that mysterious glow is still there. It’s like being in an empty house out in the countryside, on a clear moonless night, with all the lights turned off, and finding it’s not completely dark,” said Lauer.
Amazon announced Friday that it has purchased three Falcon 9 rocket launches from SpaceX beginning in mid-2025 to help deploy the retail giant's network of Kuiper Internet satellites. //
Last year, Amazon bought up most of the Western world's excess launch capacity from everyone but SpaceX, securing 68 rocket flights from United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to deploy thousands of satellites for the Kuiper broadband network. Amazon previously contracted with ULA for nine Atlas V launches to support the initial series of Kuiper launches, the first of which lifted off in October with Amazon's first two Kuiper prototype satellites. More Atlas Vs will start launching operational Kuiper satellites next year. //
Amazon is helping to fund a big expansion in ULA's footprint at its Florida launch base, an effort that will double the ULA's launch capacity. The investment to fund the growth in ULA's capability to support Kuiper launches totals about $2 billion, with around $500 million going toward upgrades at Cape Canaveral.
Those upgrades include the outfitting of a second vertical hangar and a second mobile launch platform for Vulcan rockets, alongside the integration facility and launch table already built to support the first few Vulcan missions. Having dual lanes for launch processing in Florida will allow ULA to fly as many as 25 Vulcan rockets per year, the company says.
ULA and its subcontractors are also expanding factory space at locations around the country to produce more Vulcan engines, solid rocket boosters, and payload fairings for the Kuiper missions.
Amazon and ULA officials hope these investments will spare the Vulcan rocket from the growing pains experienced by other launch vehicles as they enter service. For example, it took 31 months for the Atlas V rocket to reach its fifth flight in the early 2000s. A decade ago, SpaceX's Falcon 9 made its fifth flight 33 months after its inaugural launch.
That won't do if Amazon is going to deploy more than 1,600 Kuiper satellites by mid-2026.
Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached "Interstellar space" and each continue their unique journey through the Universe. In the NASA Eyes on the Solar System app, you can see the real spacecraft trajectories of the Voyagers, which are updated every five minutes. Distance and velocities are updated in real-time. For a full 3D, immersive experience click on View Voyagers link below to launch the NASA Eyes on the Solar System app.
Over the past couple years, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has continually smashed its own speed records. And in the next year, it will continue to break more records.
The agency's well-fortified spacecraft is swooping progressively closer to the sun, and during each pass, picks up more speed. In 2018, soon after its launch, the probe became the fastest human-made object ever built, and by 2024 it will reach a whopping 430,000 miles per hour.
At such a speed, one could travel from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in 20 seconds.
The spacecraft recently reached 394,736 mph. //
Space weather researchers have some weighty questions. They want to know why the solar wind accelerates after it leaves the sun, reaching up to 2 million mph. They want to grasp why the corona (which reaches 2 million degrees Fahrenheit) is so much hotter than the sun's surface (it's 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit). And they want to understand how extreme space weather, caused by different types of solar explosions, can behave and ultimately impact Earth. //
On the outskirts of the corona, the spacecraft is relentlessly exposed to brutal heat and radiation, and in September 2022 it flew through "one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever recorded," NASA said. Yet the craft remains in great shape. That's largely thanks to a 4.5-inch-thick carbon heat shield that's pointed at the sun. The shield itself heats up to some 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, but just a couple of feet behind the shield, the environs are surprisingly pleasant.
"Most of the instruments are working at room temperatures," Raouafi said.
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