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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>