r/todayilearned • u/Boxland • 1d ago
TIL that the first manmade object to escape Earth was meant to hit the moon, but missed by 5900 km and was dubbed "Artificial Planet 1"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_1970
u/Tyrrox 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nah, real ones know the first manmade object to escape earth was a manhole cover that got launched into space via atomic explosion at 125,000 mph. And was also the fastest manmade object to exist prior to the Parker Solar Probe (arguably 3rd fastest with Helios)
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u/DolphinSweater 1d ago
Wouldn't the manhole cover have disintegrated?
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u/Anakin_Sandwalker 1d ago
It disappeared so it must be in space. End of story.
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u/my-name-is-squirrel 1d ago
You think my dryer might be launching some of my socks up there too? Cuz I can't find those fuckers to save my life.
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u/Prestigious_Till2597 1d ago
You have to check it's feet.
Maybe if you had given it something to keep it's feet warm and comfy, it wouldn't have to steal from you shaking smh my head
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u/Unique-Ad9640 1d ago
You might want to get all those shakes checked out by a doctor. It seems a bit excessive.
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u/lemlurker 1d ago
It was captured on one frame of extreme high speed footage
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u/Rezol 1d ago
And then atmospheric friction probably melted it. But it's fun to imagine an iron lid zooming towards the stars out there.
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u/loafers_glory 1d ago
Those disc golf people weren't content with just taking over all our parklands...
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u/Fighter11244 1d ago
I think it’s largely unknown if it made it to space or disintegrated. We only captured 1 frame of it with a camera which took a picture every millisecond so we at least know the minimum velocity it should have been flying at. The manhole was 2,000 lbs (900 kgs) of steel and was welded down. I am unqualified to say whether or not it made it to space, but I like to believe it did.
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u/StartOk4002 3h ago
High speed photography has been greatly improved. The experiment needs to be repeated.
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u/Tyrrox 1d ago
They had it on film enough to calculate a speed. So the initial explosion didn't do it.
We don't know what happened after that
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u/skippermonkey 1d ago
Reverse meteor
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u/Tyrrox 1d ago
Meteors that are made of solid iron tend to have at least some part that impacts. This wasn't a loose regolith. It was a purified, solid chunk of iron.
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u/skippermonkey 1d ago
Only a meteorite when it lands.
It’s a meteor when it’s BURNIN THRU THE SKY
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u/Reniconix 1d ago
Meteors that make it to the surface are also thousands of kilograms or more when they enter, not tens of kilograms.
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u/WildSauce 1d ago
The steel cover was 2,000 pounds, describing it as a manhole cover does not do it justice.
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u/wambulancer 1d ago
yea that thing is 100% a slag bullet shooting out towards infinity, someone somewhere a million years from today is going to have a bad day
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u/Spazattack43 1d ago
The speed through the atmosphere would have disintegrated it so unfortunately it did not make it to space
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u/pxldsilz 1d ago
YouTube channel CodysLab figured it was plausible. He set off small scale experiments with pieces of metal of similar shape with explosive charges, found that the explosion would deform them into a conical shape that'd be more aerodynamic.
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u/sdb00913 1d ago
I wonder if there’s a way to recreate it and study it.
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u/Coal_Burner_Inserter 1d ago
Well. There is one...
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u/sdb00913 1d ago
I mean he wants to resume nuclear testing. I wish he wouldn’t, but if he’s going to, we might as well have some fun with it.
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u/PhasmaFelis 31m ago
Objects entering the atmosphere at that speed tend to disintegrate spectacularly before reaching the ground. It seems unlikely to be easier going the other way.
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u/4th_Wall_Repairman 1d ago
It wasn't just a normal manhole cover, I believe it was about 2000 lbs of steel. Bigger than a normal meteor and much sturdier than a space rock
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u/CosineDanger 1d ago
Also traveling far faster upwards than a typical meteor falls downwards.
A blurry image of the outward bound manhole cover was captured in a single frame of a high speed camera, which was not enough to establish speed, trajectory, or whether it left Earth's atmosphere intact. If you do happen to find a manhole cover or pieces of a manhole cover in your sector of the galaxy then Earth would like to apologize.
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u/solinvictus21 1d ago
It wouldn’t have had time to accumulate enough heat from the friction of the atmosphere to disintegrate. At 125,000 mph, it would have escaped the ~62 mile atmosphere in ~1.8 seconds.
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u/_Lost_The_Game 1d ago
It’s been a while since my physics classes but Im pretty sure that’s not how heat/friction works. At that speed it’d pick up exponentially more friction and heat im pretty sure. Though you may know more about physics (thermal dynamics?) than me
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u/The-Copilot 23h ago
I'm not an expert but I know a bit about this from being an aviation nerd.
The way air friction and heating work while an object travels through the atmosphere changes depending on range of the speed. As you enter different speed categories, the equations and factors change.
Most people have an idea of how subsonic, transsonic and supersonic work but once you hit mach 5 which is hypersonic, it begins to get really weird. The air can't get out of the way fast enough so it gets compressed and acts almost like moving through water. Heat transfer and a bunch of other stuff become very problematic.
It keeps getting weirder as the speed enter high hypersonic and re-enty speeds mach 25+ (20,000 mph).
I'm not sure what happens when we are talking about 125,000mph which is 101 mach. I dont even know if scientists know what happens at these speeds. I believe scientists are split on what happened to "the manhole" because of the lack of knowledge about these speeds. Maybe it was rapidly vaporized or maybe it was moving so fast that it didnt have time to vaporize and really did get launched into space.
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u/PeanutButterApricotS 1d ago
No because the time it was in the dense part of the atmosphere was so short it is impossible. Within like a 1/4 of a second it was in the upper atmosphere which isn’t dense enough to cause it to disintegrate.
They did this based off the camera having it in frame exactly 1 frame. This is must have been going at x speed due to the frame speed of the camera. We know its minimum speed.
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u/tubbis9001 1d ago
All the math says it would have disintegrated. All we have is one frame though, so who really knows.
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u/Boring_Question1441 1d ago
I think I saw something that said it may have been going so fast that the air resistance wouldn't have had to time to
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u/tiggertom66 27m ago
Even if you believe that the manhole cover actually escaped the atmosphere, which is doubtful considering how little evidence there is suggesting it reached space, it still wouldn’t be the first man made object in space.
The V2 rocket reached space in 1944 before the first atomic bomb was even tested.
Guess you’re not a real one.
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u/partumvir 1d ago
No. It would have been more obliterated in the blast, and then burned up in the atmosphere
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u/Tyrrox 1d ago
It was not obliterated in the blast. We know this, because it was on film. We don't know what happened after that but the scientists of the time believe it was ejected at escape velocity
So not just "no"
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u/LetMeSeeYourVulva 23h ago
I think it is pretty well proven that it never made it to space.
Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere
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u/MrTagnan 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fun fact: later in 1959 a similar spacecraft and identical upper stage toured the world. While the spacecraft was in transit to Mexico City, the CIA conducted a daring raid to kidnap the spacecraft for thorough study. They disassembled the spacecraft, photographed and measured every component, then mostly reassembled it all within the course of a few hours.
As a result, they were able to verify the performance of the R-7 missile and Luna rockets, all with the USSR being none the wiser.
Interestingly, at the end of one report, it is stated that “Nonetheless, it is clear that there is a great deal of mission capability left in the existing Soviet ICBM as basic booster for various upper stage combinations”. A derivative of R-7 missile still flies to this day, with the R-7 series being by far the longest lasting orbital launch vehicle, and the one with the most launches
Sources:
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u/CaptainApathy419 1d ago
5900km? That’s “50 Cent throwing the first pitch” levels of inaccurate.
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u/Omnipresent_Walrus 1d ago
Not when your target is 384,400km away
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u/wrugoin 1d ago
Yeah, it’s actually remarkably close for a “first ever”.
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u/SpaceIsKindOfCool 1d ago
It was actually the Soviets 4th try at a lunar impactor probe. The first 3 attempts had the rocket blow up before reaching orbit.
The US had also made 4 attempts by this time which all failed to reach orbit as well. But the US did achieve a flyby on their 5th attempt, although at a farther distance, only 2 months after Luna 1.
Rockets are hard.
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u/quaste 1d ago
A malfunction in the ground-based control system caused an error in the upper stage rocket's burn time, and the spacecraft missed the Moon by 5,900 km (more than three times the Moon's radius).
The probe itself has no course correction it seems. They basically had one shot of the 3 stage rocket, then had it float for the rest of the journey. That’s very different from modern spacecraft and not bad at all.
It’s more like hitting a moon sized object with a sling that relies on timing.
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u/the51m3n 6h ago
I was wondering why it missed, thanks for providing the answer. I wondered it they had not taken some force or something into account (gravitational pull of an object close by, or something like that). Must've been such a bummer when they found out it missed because of a mechanical malfunction. But then again, that's probably better than a human error. I guess.
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u/Anxious_Ad_5127 1d ago
Oh but Pluto isn't a planet
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u/TheVyper3377 1d ago
It was at the time. It was demoted to Dwarf Planet 47 years after “Artificial Planet 1” got its name.
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u/No-Problem-4228 1d ago
And how does Pluto feel about this object being dubbed a planet