Along similar lines to the U-boat steel, some physics experiments (especially neutrino detectors, which are necessarily extremely sensitive) are shielded with lead salvaged from the ballast of sunken Spanish galleons. The problem with normal lead is that cosmic rays can transmute the occasional atom to something radioactive, but the water has shielded the galleon salvage for long enough that most of those transmuted atoms have decayed back to lead.
Without an atmosphere, each individual bit of debris will follow its own parabolic arc (well, technically an arc of an ellipse, but it’d be pretty close to a parabola), independent of the rest of the debris. Without an ambient atmosphere, you won’t get any sort of turbulence effects, and therefore won’t be able to form the cap of the mushroom cloud.
Interesting, we used pretty old lead blocks for primary shielding/collimation of the detectors, but to combat the lead X-rays (cosmic rays interactions with lead) we would put sheets of cadmium inside the lead wall on the detector side. The Cd was an excellent absorber of the 60 keV x rays, which are very close to some of the isotopes one was looking for as well.
I thought the lead xrays we an ongoing interaction with the cosmic ray/muons, rather than an activation product, although it could be both, and my memory could be very faulty.
Yes but still a pin point for a second or so, right? Hardly the horror of the mushroom cloud or anything else that would fuel the nightmares of a generation.
Muons are pretty penetrating, but neutrino detectors are deep enough underground that they’re a non-issue. Even if natural earth isn’t the best shielding, a few miles of it will still work well enough.
A 1950’s era ICBM was capable of hitting the moon? Is that true?
When we say that no modern rockets can “reach the moon”, is there an implicit assumption that we’re talking about an 11-ton payload? If we were talking about a warhead-sized payload (say 100kg), does that bring nuking the moon into the realm of feasibility for modern commercial or military rockets?
It’s not the nukes I’m worried about, it’s that off-worlder who’s been funding all the mining operations when he knows damn well the place is played out. I’ve been suspicious of him ever since I told him I didn’t want his great Darsh face hanging over my garden wall.
I remember a pre-Apollo sf short story I read long ago. The first manned mission is interpreted by a long-dead alien race’s AI defense systems on the Moon as an attack, triggering a retaliatory response. The astronauts watch in horror as a wave of missiles passes them, heading back towards Earth…
In the event that we did blow up the moon - what would be the consequences to our planet (ignoring the possible destruction of the earth from newly formed meteorites)?
We’d no longer have a moon that would give us tides - does that mean the ocean levels would stay the same at any given time, and / or would there be other effects? This assumes there would not be any major detrius still orbiting.
