
Standard Units please
Linguini, double Decker buses, debris would fill x number of Olympic sized swimming pools etc.
The Hubble space telescope has snapped a pic believed to show the results of two dinosaur-biffing asteroids smacking into each other in a hypervelocity collision - faster than two cannon shells fired from supersonic jet fighters hitting one another head on*. P/2010 A2 Hubble image. Credit: NASA In space, nobody can hear you …
I think you may be thinking of an incident on the 21 September 1956 in merkin-land, when pilot Tom Attridge fired two bursts from his 20mm cannon mid-way through a climb manoeuvre, he then put the aircraft, a Grumman F11F/F-11 Tiger, into a shallow dive but as the velocity and trajectory of the cannon rounds decayed he managed to fly into his own gunfire.
Quite a number of pilots have become a cropper with their own missiles, but that's really a technology failure, it takes real Darwin award winning skill to shoot yourself down with your own guns.
I believe that the first pilots to fall foul of this particular problem were those flying the Me163 "Komet" in WWII.
They found the hard way that the standard tactic of approaching the target from above and behind, firing a burst as you close and then levelling out to pass beneath the target with the intention of going around for another try put them neatly in the hail of 20mm cannon fire that they'd unleashed a couple of moments earlier.
Not a good idea when flying something that's quite prone to explode without any external intervention anyway.
Really?? Does el reg know something we don't?
From Wiki wonders world of pop-ular knowledge:
Mig-25
The airspeed indicator was redlined at Mach 2.8, with typical intercept speeds near Mach 2.5 in order to extend the service life of the engines. A MiG-25 was tracked flying over Sinai at Mach 3.2 in the early 1970s, but the flight had resulted in the destruction of its engines.
And in Wikiland the aircraft-related stuff is quite good, and they're citing another source which is probably good for the facts, too.
In Soviet aircraft fantasy land, meanwhile, it's all "that Firefox movie was on the money" and waffling about some Soviet überaircraft that someone sketched on the back of a napkin once.
Alternatively, the closing speed of the asteroid impact was almost twice as fast as two colliding cannon shells fired from two F-16s* flying towards each other at top speed.
Top speed of an F-16 is around Mach 2 I believe (1,500mph), plus the two lots of 1,700mph for the cannon shells makes a total of 6,400mph.
* An aircraft which *does* have a cannon. :)