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Live! Falcon Heavy, world's most powerful rocket, maiden flight

I think I might have to declare this on the ‘obvious facts you’ve only just realised about’ thread in the General forum. Either that or there’s something else I’m not getting.

Are sonic booms also generated when an object passes through the sound barrier in the other direction (from faster than to slower than)? I had always assumed it was only when they exceeded the speed of sound...
 
It's not when they pass through the sound barrier. All objects exceeding the sound barrier create "sonic booms".

Waits to be told I'm completely wrong on this...
That’s what I always thought. So why should there be a sonic boom in that video when the boosters are slowing down, not increasing speed?
 
Because - despite the fact they were slowing down - they were travelling faster then the speed of sound.
 
That’s what I always thought. So why should there be a sonic boom in that video when the boosters are slowing down, not increasing speed?
That sonic boom is arriving at the observer from an earlier phase of the descent (around 5-10km above and a few kms downrange of the observation location). It is not generated by the stages at the time you are seeing them.
 
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It's back. And boy has Musk turned into a Grade A cunt while it's been away.

On January 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of a new asteroid.

The object was dubbed 2018 CN41 after the year and month when the telescope observations took place. The "asteroid" has an eccentric orbit, which qualified it as a Near-Earth Object (NEO), taking it within the Moon's orbit at a distance less than 240,000 kilometers (150,000 miles) from Earth.

While still undisputedly an object near Earth, the Minor Planet Center issued a correction the following day after they confirmed it was in fact Elon Musk's own Tesla Roadster, which he famously launched into space in February 2018, attached to the Falcon Heavy Upper stage booster.




Keeping an eye on the car isn't exactly astronomers' most pressing concern, but a few have tried to calculate the fate of the vehicle, and whether it poses a threat to Earth. In 2018, one paper did just this, finding that it has a reasonable chance of hitting Earth eventually.
Looking at the car's orbit, and potential close encounters that could adjust its trajectory, the team calculated that the car has roughly a 22 percent probability of hitting Earth, a 12 percent chance of colliding with Venus, and about the same probability of hitting the Sun as hitting Venus. Fortunately for Musk, this will happen on a timescale of millions of years, and is unlikely to affect Tesla stock prices.
The car will make another close approach in 2047 at about 5 million kilometers (3.1 million miles). Beyond 100 years, repeat close encounters with the planets make long-term predictions of the car's chaotic orbit "impossible".
 
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