SPACE PROGRAME
I have to admit, I'm a real fan of space programs.
This evening I stumbled across an article on the BBC website in the science section; the Rosetta spacecraft, named after the stone, is making her final pass around the earth before hurtling out into deep space to chase down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This rendezvous should take place some time in 2014 and is doubtlessly going to make many astrophysicists very excited. It was, however, another detail which caught my eye whilst reading the article that got me rather excited.
Here is the quote:
This got me thinking; I started wondering what the fastest man made object is. We will discount things such as particle accelerators because we're technically not creating the particles, just accelerating them. According to this website the fastest man made object is the Helios 2 spacecraft, launched in 1976 and is in orbit around the sun; reaching a maximum speed of 67km/s (150 000 mph). And yet these speeds are still slow, Helios 2 is traveling at about 0.00002 times the speed of light, and would take 18 000 years to reach the nearest star beyond our solar system! Oh, and for comparison, it's reckoned that modern man has existed for somewhere around 150 000 years.
In the time it's taken you to read this post the Rosetta spacecraft could have traveled nearly 1000km and if you check out the links I posted then you could easily get from London to New York and back!
As I typed this a friend pointed out that the same websitementioned above also hosts a, quite frankly amazing, list of "top speeds".
I have to admit, I'm a real fan of space programs.
This evening I stumbled across an article on the BBC website in the science section; the Rosetta spacecraft, named after the stone, is making her final pass around the earth before hurtling out into deep space to chase down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This rendezvous should take place some time in 2014 and is doubtlessly going to make many astrophysicists very excited. It was, however, another detail which caught my eye whilst reading the article that got me rather excited.
Here is the quote:
Now, 13km/s is around 29 000 mph, that's fast! Escape velocity for the earth is about 11km/s so it's like launching a spacecraft, getting into space and then putting in the same energy again!Rosetta is expected to be moving at some 13.3km/s as it sweeps over the Indian Ocean, just south of the Indonesian island of Java.
This got me thinking; I started wondering what the fastest man made object is. We will discount things such as particle accelerators because we're technically not creating the particles, just accelerating them. According to this website the fastest man made object is the Helios 2 spacecraft, launched in 1976 and is in orbit around the sun; reaching a maximum speed of 67km/s (150 000 mph). And yet these speeds are still slow, Helios 2 is traveling at about 0.00002 times the speed of light, and would take 18 000 years to reach the nearest star beyond our solar system! Oh, and for comparison, it's reckoned that modern man has existed for somewhere around 150 000 years.
In the time it's taken you to read this post the Rosetta spacecraft could have traveled nearly 1000km and if you check out the links I posted then you could easily get from London to New York and back!
As I typed this a friend pointed out that the same websitementioned above also hosts a, quite frankly amazing, list of "top speeds".
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