under pressure

A lunch gathering of the large variety occurred today at Andy's in-laws. We were able to catch up with Antoinette,who is in her third year of medicine at Newcastle Uni and still looks quite sane. From memory, Jennie had gone completely mad by mid second year :-) We spent most of the afternoon watching Top Gear clips on Youtube with Paul who is in his final semester of an aerodynamics and aviation design degree at Sydney Uni. He's still wishing that some of the lecturers spoke english. A bit.

Actinopterygii Beloniformes Exocoetidae

Similar to any other wartime incident, there is still heaps of conjecture, bollocks, conspiracy theory, and propaganda flotsaming about the ghost of the HMS Sheffield, a full quarter of a century later. The AM.39 Exocet cruise missile fired by an Argentine naval Super Étendard is unique as it was the first airborne anti-ship missile of it's type used in combat. The fact that it may or may not have exploded just makes it fairly typical for an Exocet I think. I'm not aware of any other uniquities about it but that's not surprising for me - was it a funny colour? It was travelling at about 1000kmph? The Sheffield radar was off due to routine radio traffic? The conjecture about the distance it was launched from Sheffield (5 to 40 miles)? The height above the water line that it struck the Sheffield? The fact that it was french and it still worked?

What was the first man made object to impact another planet's surface and how much had it's designers underestimated the prospective atmospheric pressure by?