I read somewhere it must’ve turned molten from the atmosphere, but l wonder if like little droplets of metal fell down to earth or if it was just vaporized.
However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated…
Just four and a half orders of magnitude off. Oops.
Anything that wasn’t vaporized was likely launched out into space at speeds exceeding escape velocity for Earth’s gravitational field by a factor of 6. So if there was anything left after the explosion and wind friction, it’s out in space, probably moving towards the sun.
The best part of that story is that the engineer on the project initially rejected the metal cap, because he knew it would not do anything to contain the blast. His supervisor overruled him, and insisted they install the cap. The engineer complied, but also ensured a high speed camera was trained on the cap to capture just how spectacularly stupid his manager was.
The high speed camera was intended to be used to calculate the speed of the cap. It was going so fast it was only captured in 1 frame, which is only enough information to put a lower limit on the speed.
It reached orbit and is now actively seeking and destroying Musk’s Starlink satellites.
Man can dream
Do your best, manhole cover.
Doubtful. That thing was traveling three times faster than the fastest meteorite we’ve recorded entering the atmosphere. It probably vaporized almost as soon as it took off since 900 kilos of steel is nothing, ablatively speaking, at those speeds in sea level air pressure.
Hypothetically, even if the heat of the blast didn’t vaporize it, I don’t see how something that size moving at 150,000 mph wouldn’t ablate from intense friction with the atmosphere before reaching space.
Liquid things going in high speed through the atmosphere get atomized. So, yeah, it just became dust and went down in some rain.
all we are is dust in the wind
My guess is that it just vaporized and then turned into dust.
