![]() ![]() Bertha needed to carve through 1.7 miles of rock, and just 1000 feet in, the 57-foot, 6559-ton machine ran into a steel pipe casing that damaged it. In 2013, Bertha-named after Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle's first female mayor-was tasked with building a tunnel that would be big enough to carry four lanes of traffic (a two-lane, double-decker road). The scope of Bertha's work had no precedent in modern-day digging, given the dense, abrasive glacial soil and bedrock it had to chew through. When Seattle decided it needed a giant tunnel to replace an aging highway through the middle of the city, the city contracted with Hitachi Zosen Corporation to build the biggest tunnel boring machine in the world to do the job. Since the retirement of the orbiters, these long-serving machines are once again being repurposed to transport NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS), which, at 38 stories tall, will be the biggest rocket ever constructed when it's ready, hopefully in a few years (the timeline is in flux due to budgetary issues). Without a vehicle to move rockets from the spot they were stacked to the launch pad, we never could have gotten off the ground, much less to the moon.Īfter our moon missions, the crawler-transporters were adapted to service the Space Shuttle program, and moved the shuttles from 1981 to 2003. The 4.2-mile trip was a slow one the transporters traveled at a rate of 1 mph to ensure the massive rockets didn't topple over. The vehicles' first job was to move Saturn V rockets-which took us to the moon and measured 35 stories tall when fully constructed-from the massive Vehicle Assembly Building (the largest single-room building in the world) to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. In contrast, the average semi truck gets roughly 6.5 miles per gallon. NASA, via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domainīuilt in 1965, NASA's crawler-transporters are two of the largest vehicles ever constructed: They weigh 2400 tons each and burn 150 gallons of diesel per mile. Scientists are already working on the LHC's successor, which will be three times its size and seven times more powerful. The discovery illuminates the early development of the universe, including how particles gained mass after the Big Bang. Scientists had been chasing the Higgs boson for five decades. the "God" particle-which helps give other particles mass. Since the LHC started up in 2008, scientists have made numerous groundbreaking discoveries, including finding the once-theoretical Higgs boson particle-a.k.a. When the beams collide, scientists use the data to find the answers to some of the most basic questions of physics and the laws that govern the universe we live in. The tubes of the LHC are a vacuum superconducting magnets guide and accelerate two high-energy particle beams, which are moving in opposite directions, to near-light-speed. The Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator located at CERN outside of Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest machine in the world: It has a circumference of almost 17 miles and took around a decade to build. ![]()
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