British space penetrator passes icy test

Wow this is really cool, UK engineers have tested a projectile technology that they believe could be used to explore the Solar System.
It looks like a massive bullet or shell and it will carry instruments inside to test other worlds...the thing is it fires the shell at 600 miles an hour and everything inside is fine, at peak g it experiences 24 thousand G but remains intact and whatever inside remains intact also.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Here is a lecture to do with the tech.



Best thing is it is going to be very cheap.
Enjoy anyhow.

reply to post by boymonkey74


Well done for a brilliantly simple concept at a brilliantly cheap price. It always amazes me when we have our backs to the wall financially, how our imaginations come up with such clever ideas and concepts.

(I don't think that we need our backs to the wall all the time for all our ideas though).

Originally posted by boymonkey74
Wow this is really cool, UK engineers have tested a projectile technology that they believe could be used to explore the Solar System.
It looks like a massive bullet or shell and it will carry instruments inside to test other worlds...the thing is it fires the shell at 600 miles an hour and everything inside is fine, at peak g it experiences 24 thousand G but remains intact and whatever inside remains intact also.

Actually he says they CAN'T fire the shell to get off the Earth and land on other planets, and he really doesn't discuss the launch mode much except to say they can't fire it from the Earth's surface.

The test they did was merely to simulate an impact landing. In the video he mentions the 10,000g in the test into sand and then 50,000g expected into the ice of Europa, which actually turned out to be 24,000g in the ice test, as mentioned in the article. The way they get it to survive the impact is to basically fill it with epoxy so nothing can move.

Your animated avatar is very annoying.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Sorry I never said they will fire it from the earth....Oh and tough many have said they love me scrubbing kitty..

reply to post by boymonkey74

You didn't say they fired it from Earth but you said they fired it at 600mph and it carries instruments to other worlds in the same sentence, which could imply a relationship between those two statements. To be more clear you could have talked about the test in a separate sentence from other world missions. They don't fire it at 600mph to get to other worlds, and I was amazed he could give such a long talk about how this thing can explore other worlds and never say how it will get there but only say how it WON'T get there, by firing it.

And the scrubbing kitty IS cute the first one or 2 times you see it, but I doubt people have told you they enjoy seeing it 100,000 times in a row while watching an embedded video.