What went wrong with this nuke?

[happywaffle]

Digg or Reddit or one of those sites sent me here today:
http://amazingfiltered.blogspot.com/2007/04/nuclear-explosions-photo-collection.html

It’s a pretty disturbing (and oddly beautiful) collection of nuclear bombs going off.

Out of the whole bunch, though, this one stood out. It looks like it failed to make any kind of real mushroom shape, and there’s distinct chunks fluttering back to earth, reminding me of the Challenger.

Any idea why it’s different? Did it not go off right? Maybe it’s just smaller than the others?

[Autolycus]

Reminds me of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[gazpacho]

That is mostly just a photo taken soon after the explosion. It takes a while for the mushroom cloud to form.

[Squink]

That looks like a shallow underground burst:

When a nuclear explosion occurs at a shallow depth underground, the fireball breaks through the surface of the earth within a fraction of a second of the instant of detonation. The intensely hot gases at high pressure are released and they carry up with them into the air large quantities of soil, rock, and debris in the form of a hollow column. For a burst at a shallow depth, the column tends to assume the shape of an inverted cone which fans out as it rises, to produce a radial throw-out. A highly radioactive cloud, which contains large quantities of earth, is formed above the throw-out as the hot vapors cool and condense. Because of the mass displacement of material from the earth’s surface, a crater is formed. For a 100-kiloton weapon exploding 50 feet beneath the surface of dry soil, the crater would be about 120 feet deep and 720 feet across. The weight of the material removed would be over a million tons.

[commasense]

Squink is right, it was a shallow underground explosion. It’s the Sedan test, July 6, 1962, a part of the Plowshare program to test nukes for mining and cratering purposes. It was about 13 miles from the place now known as Area 51.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

What I’m curious to know is what the little streamers parallel to some of the explosions (like in this explosion) are. Anyone know?

[Squink]

Likely, they’re rocket trails, launched before the blast to see what it does to the atmosphere.

[Tuckerfan]

@Sophistry and Illusion

What I’m curious to know is what the little streamers parallel to some of the explosions (like in this explosion) are. Anyone know?

My understanding is that they’re to provide a reference grid for folks examining the footage later to get an idea of how big the bang was.

[threemae]

@Tuckerfan

My understanding is that they’re to provide a reference grid for folks examining the footage later to get an idea of how big the bang was.

Also I think they hoped to track air-currents and schock waves via these streamer-rockets.

[Chronos]

Nah, they’re just providing grass clouds for the mushroom clouds to grow in ;).

[commasense]

@Tuckerfan

My understanding is that they’re to provide a reference grid for folks examining the footage later to get an idea of how big the bang was.

This is it. A colleague of mine who is an expert on nuclear weapons explained to me that they are the trails of rockets sent up just before the blast. The spacing is known so they serve as a yardstick for the size of the blast.