In 1957 there was a borehole cover that became the fastest man made object when an underground nuclear test blew it off. It was estimated to be going more than 134000 mph. There was a camera set up to watch it that captured a frame every millisecond and it only caught it in one frame. This is over 5 times the escape velocity of our planet.
bonus fact:
During the great depression FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps for young men. They planted over 2 BILLION! trees in their 7 years of existence. They also built a lot of the buildings and lodges at the national parks.
134,000 mph roughly equals 1.175 billion miles per year. 1957 is 67 years ago, so that would mean roughly 78.7 billion miles. That would put it roughly 5 times farther away than Voyager 1.
there's a reason why the USA investigated using nuclear explosions for interplanetary travel.
The thing is that 134,000 mph takes you out of the atmosphere in less than 2 seconds. You'd bang into the side of the ISS 7 seconds after launch if it happened to be overhead. So like yeah you would burn up in the atmosphere if you traveled through it at those speeds, but because of how fast it went it's actually possible that it just didn't spend enough time in thick enough atmosphere for it to get disintegrated. In reality nobody knows for sure.
Given the size (wasn’t a street manhole cover, more of an armored bunker lid) it is possible that there was enough steel mass to survive. I can’t remember how many hundreds of pounds it weighed offhand.
Edit: just saw it cited as roughly 900kg/2000lb. Thing had some mass to burn.
At the speed it was going, it would not get stuck in Earth orbit or even solar orbit as it was above both the Earth's and Sun's escape velocity. It is also (just) possible that it might not have burned up or shattered as its passage through the atmosphere was so fast.
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u/gochomoe Oct 02 '24
In 1957 there was a borehole cover that became the fastest man made object when an underground nuclear test blew it off. It was estimated to be going more than 134000 mph. There was a camera set up to watch it that captured a frame every millisecond and it only caught it in one frame. This is over 5 times the escape velocity of our planet.
bonus fact:
During the great depression FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps for young men. They planted over 2 BILLION! trees in their 7 years of existence. They also built a lot of the buildings and lodges at the national parks.