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#12
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02-19-2013, 06:08 AM
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| So Fucking Banned Poster Rank:588 Join Date: Jul 2010 Posts: 1,589 Mentioned: 1 Post(s) Quoted: 803 Post(s)
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Re: Space Facts
Oil is any viscous hydrophobic liquid miscible in alcohol or ether, fossil fuels are but one example. Canola and mineral oil, for instance. The oil on Titan is a thick organic tar-like substance, probably quite flammable. Lucky for any Titanians, there is no oxygen for it to catch fire.
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#15
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03-24-2013, 12:11 AM
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| ♚ Legacy Gold Member ♚ Poster Rank:99 Male Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 16,468 Mentioned: 6 Post(s) Quoted: 4543 Post(s)
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Re: Space Facts
Actually, the first man made object in space was launched accidentally, out of the New Mexico desert. It was a hatch cover, weighing about 4 tons, that was used to close the cavity on our first underground atomic blast test. I believe it was in the late 1950's The story is that the hatch cover was manufactured to fit the drill hole that was used to place the nuclear weapon. The weapon was built, test and placed, and then the hatch cover was installed to "contain" whatever blast came back up out of the ground. The test was done, and the next question was "Hey, where'd the hatch cover go?!?!?!" They looked all over New Mexico, and finally started looking in Mexico (That was a BIG problem, because when the U.S. was launching the German V-2's that we captured after the war, one of them went off course and landed in Mexico, and although there was no warhead (Just test equipment) it was a major international incident at the time.) Finally they looked at the high speed camera film, and going frame by frame, they found the hatch cover visible in one frame, and then just the edge of it in the next frame. They calculated the speed of the hatch cover at initial launch as something around 100,000 mph. Once they established that, and knowing that escape velocity of the earth is only 25,000 mph, they knew it had gone into space. What about wind resistance, slowing it down before it got to space? Well, at 100,000 miles per hour, that is 27 miles per SECOND! Which means it reached space in LESS than 2 seconds of flight. (Boundary of space is generally considered as about 50 miles up) The estimates were that it was still doing about 75,000 miles per hour by the time it got to space, and has continued blasting along at that rate for the intervening 55 or so years. It has been going into outer space far longer and far faster than anything else launched by humans. I hope the aliens don't ask us to pay for the replacement of their spaceship windshield when that hatch chips the glass. |
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#18
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03-26-2013, 11:57 PM
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Re: Space Facts
I'm more interested in Europa - the moon is about the size of our moon but it has far more liquid water under it's ice than all of the oceans of the earth. It has reocurring tidal heat from gravity stress from Jupiter. The surface cracks open and freezes shut regularly. The ice surface is radiatet, but just inches under the surface could harbor life - and under the ice shell there is probably heat vents from the hot core heating the water. Could be full of life - crazy |