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Letting my inner geek out to play...
Jul. 6th, 2013 05:29 pmSo as you might imagine, there are quite a number of videos of this past Tuesday's failed Proton launch. In mine, it took about 16 seconds for the sound of the explosion to reach me.
In a video taken by an individual standing right at the Cosmos Hotel, the delay between seeing and hearing the explosion is between 9 and 10 seconds. (I should probably mention that there are exceptions to the evacuation rule, as occurred with the individual who shot the video from the Cosmos on Tuesday, and with me in 2005, when I had a launch-related function to perform inside the evacuation zone, but I digress...).
Knowing the spots from which both videos were taken, and that sound travels at a certain speed through air (the only wrinkle being that the speed changes with temperature, with sound traveling faster through warmer air), I assumed a uniform air temperature of 25°C—which corresponds to a speed of sound through air of 346 m/s—and did a little math to figure out how far I was and how far the guy at the Cosmos was from the explosion.
The rest was a matter of firing up Google Earth and plotting some points and lines:
The light blue arc represents locations that are 16 seconds "distant" from my observation point (OP) located near our office at about 46° 4' 34.68" N, 62° 55' 47.22" E. (In other words sound from any point along that light blue arc would take 16 seconds to get to the yellow push-pin over on the left.)
The same logic applies to the light green arc represents locations that are 9.5 seconds "distant" from the yellow push-pin representing the Cosmos Hotel. The place where the two arcs intersect is about 16 seconds from where I was, and about 9.5 seconds from the Cosmos, i.e., the crash site, more or less.
That said, with this new-found knowledge and 100 rubles, I can buy a beer in the restaurant downstairs! (Still, it's nice to figure stuff like this out.)
Cheers...
In a video taken by an individual standing right at the Cosmos Hotel, the delay between seeing and hearing the explosion is between 9 and 10 seconds. (I should probably mention that there are exceptions to the evacuation rule, as occurred with the individual who shot the video from the Cosmos on Tuesday, and with me in 2005, when I had a launch-related function to perform inside the evacuation zone, but I digress...).
Knowing the spots from which both videos were taken, and that sound travels at a certain speed through air (the only wrinkle being that the speed changes with temperature, with sound traveling faster through warmer air), I assumed a uniform air temperature of 25°C—which corresponds to a speed of sound through air of 346 m/s—and did a little math to figure out how far I was and how far the guy at the Cosmos was from the explosion.
The rest was a matter of firing up Google Earth and plotting some points and lines:
The light blue arc represents locations that are 16 seconds "distant" from my observation point (OP) located near our office at about 46° 4' 34.68" N, 62° 55' 47.22" E. (In other words sound from any point along that light blue arc would take 16 seconds to get to the yellow push-pin over on the left.)
The same logic applies to the light green arc represents locations that are 9.5 seconds "distant" from the yellow push-pin representing the Cosmos Hotel. The place where the two arcs intersect is about 16 seconds from where I was, and about 9.5 seconds from the Cosmos, i.e., the crash site, more or less.
That said, with this new-found knowledge and 100 rubles, I can buy a beer in the restaurant downstairs! (Still, it's nice to figure stuff like this out.)
Cheers...
