You can easily see what happens above the ground when a meteor or a missile hits the ground, but a recent study shows what happens below ground when one impacts.
The research funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that soil and sand get stronger when struck hard.
This means that high-speed missiles are not always the most effective ones. High-speed missiles encounter greater ground resistance, thus making some projectiles noneffective.
[quote text_size=”small” author=”– Abe Clark” author_title=”Study researcher and postdoctoral associate at Yale University Careers”]
Imagine you’re trying to push your way through a crowded room. If you try to run and push your way through the room faster than the people can rearrange to get out of the way, you’re going to end up applying a lot of pressure and ramming into a lot of angry people.
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The researchers from Duke University used artificial soil and sand to simulate high-speed strikes and used high-speed cameras at 40,000 frames per second to film the impact thus making it able to see what happens underground.
They found out that with faster impact the force chain was more extensive, which means that high-speed impact can cause the energy to move away faster from the point of impact. The hardening of material was also noticed at very high speed as new contact formed between the beads.
The research is aimed at building better earth-penetrating missile designs that could destroy buried targets and underground weapons, according to Tech Times.
In an unrelated story covered by Immortal News in February, North Korea tested short missiles in the sea. They indicated that the projectiles fired were anti-ship cruise missiles, and that and that their country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had personally observed the firing.
What do you think about funds spent for military testing? Is there a better and more productive ways to spend tax money and how?
