The TGV, France's homegrown high-speed railway train, has just reached the dazzling world-beating speed of 575 kph (357 mph) on the new line from Paris to Strasbourg.
GULLIVER just spoke to a friend, recently back from Shanghai, who raved about the Maglev train that runs between that city and its major airport at speeds in excess of 400 kph.
But although it would take such an engine about two and a half days to accelerate from nought to 100 kph (60 mph), by September 1999 (the month in which the mission is currently planned to end), Deep Space 1 will have increased its speed by some 13,000 kph.Ion engines work by stripping electrons from gas atoms (in this case the gas is xenon) using an electric current.
Even if it were used to attack ballistic missiles, as the initial plan envisages, it would need to penetrate only the upper atmosphere, where the air is thin.An object travelling at, say, 30,000 kph has so much kinetic energy that a warhead is superfluousKinetic-energy ASATs have developed in fits and starts.
The FRA study curtails its ambitions appropriately, discarding speeds of over 160 mph (258 kph) out of hand, and instead focussing on cheaper, more modest improvements.
By varying the load applied by the wheel and changing its speed of rotation, she has shown that smart concrete can be used to weigh vehicles as they drive over it at speeds as high as 90 kph (55mph).
In 1998, it was Honduras that bore the brunt of Hurricane Mitch, a category 5 storm with winds of up to 180 miles per hour (290 kph) that killed some 9,000 people.
Unlike the Volvo fleet, she will be heading east-to-west, against winds of up to 100 mph (160 kph) and waves of up to 40 feet, and expects to be at sea for up to 170 days.
According to a report in this week's Science, they used an even more accurate clock to detect a change in tick rates resulting from a difference in speeds of as little as 36 kph (24 mph) and a difference in height of less than a metre.Obviously not even the finest Swiss timepiece can boast the accuracy required to detect such minute shifts.
FANS of high-speed rail may criticise Amtrak, America's government-backed passenger railway, for announcing that the top speed of the new trains it is seeking for the north-east corridor will be just 160 mph (257.5 kph).
Wind speeds can reach 1,400 kph (900 mph) and monster storms frequently appear as huge, dark spots on the planet's bluish surface.
