MadSci Network: Engineering
Query:

Re: How fast does the fastest man-made object go?????

Date: Wed May 13 15:22:51 1998
Posted By: David Ellis, Researcher, NASA Lewis Research Center
Area of science: Engineering
ID: 894832819.Eg
Message:

Over a sustained period of time, the fastest objects are the satellites and probes sent from Earth to other planets. For example, Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 17.4 km/sec. That translates into covering about 3.5 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth in a year.

For short durations, in some cases milliseconds or less, other man-made objects may travel faster. Since much of the work is restricted, it is difficult to determine the maximum speed for projectiles from rail guns and other exotic weaponary. However, some open literature work does indicate the possibility of achieving muzzle speeds higher than 10 km/sec.

If you expand your definition a bit to include natural objects accelerated by man to high speeds, the clear winner for shear speed are atoms and molecules accelerated by particle beam accelerators. The highest speed is constantly changing due to improvements in the accelerators, but speeds of over 14,000 km/sec are obtained by common 1 MeV (million electron volt) accelerators. The largest accelerator at Fermilabs is now up to 2 TeV (trillion electron volts) and can accelerate aprticles to near the speed of light. That is how they found the top quark.


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