Comment Land speed record NOT broken (Score 1, Interesting) 362
Last August the Bomarr group, at a lab in Dallas, Texas, managed to accelerate a marble made of heavily compressed composite glass and steel fibers from zero to just over eight thousand miles an hour in four and one eights of a second.
The acceleration occured on a track while developing a new magnetic propulsion system that uses electromagnetics to spin an intricately spun sphere with a series of directional pulses. The compressed nature of the marble allowed it to be *very* lightweight and still strong enough to handle the force exerted upon it.
The technology is still being developed as a military defense mechanism to intercept things like unmanned spy planes without damaging them so much that useful data about the origin of the craft cannot be collected from the crash site.
The acceleration occured on a track while developing a new magnetic propulsion system that uses electromagnetics to spin an intricately spun sphere with a series of directional pulses. The compressed nature of the marble allowed it to be *very* lightweight and still strong enough to handle the force exerted upon it.
The technology is still being developed as a military defense mechanism to intercept things like unmanned spy planes without damaging them so much that useful data about the origin of the craft cannot be collected from the crash site.
