From zero to 76.000 mph in one second!

[rhodan]

From the US Department of Energy Science News website:<ul type="square">Z fires objects faster than Earth moves through space<br /><br /><i>Technique helps compute Jupiter/Saturn mass, improve peacetime fusion capsule design, stabilize stockpile</i><br /><br />ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sandia National Labs has accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second. <br /><br />The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia's Z Machine - sometimes referred to as the fastest gun in the West. Actually the fastest in the world, it is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 km/sec that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the sun, 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravitational field. <br /><br />Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration lab. <br /><br />The immediate purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter, hasten the achievement of virtually unlimited energy through peacetime atomic fusion, and provide more information about the condition of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without having to explode a nuclear weapon. <br /><br />"This is one of the few ways on earth to get hard information on problems at the outer reaches of science, rather than having to rely on complex speculations that may or may not be correct," says Marcus Knudson, lead scientist on the effort. <br /><br />Z's hurled plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters. The impact generates a shock wave - in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure - that passes through the target material. The waves are so powerful that they turn solids into liquids, liquids into gases, and gases into plasmas in the same way that heat melts ice to water or boils water into steam.</ul>

 

[Peter the Dane]

woaw what a kick!<br /><br />how about mounting such a thing on a spacecraft?<br />it could be used for both reasearch of airless bodies, like the moon and as a source of electrical propultion.<br />if used as propultion, then please dont point at my settlement ´<§;-)<br /><br />I were thinking specially at the moon, why not send up a "gun" and then shoot at the surface, with the rigth type of instruments it should provide some interesting readings.<br /><br />with perhaps several hundred readings it meigth tell more than all the rest surface exploration?<br /><br />then I dont know if this "bullet" will waporrice the surface material and if so, we can observe it in very high detail?<br />and if it is possibel to place this gun on a spacecraft and have it powered by solar energy....<br /><br />******just thinking******

 

[vogon13]

My 1974 Gremlin could do that.<br /><br /><br />If dropped into a black hole.<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>