![]() Slater Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Paulo Lozano, and Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate student Thomas Chiasson. Thanks to 10-year-old Reno Colburn from Big Rock, IL, for this question. Visit the MIT School of Engineering’s Ask an Engineer site for answers to more of your questions, and ask your own. So let’s do it-we’ve got our honeybee, he’s wearing his bee-suit and he’s soaked in something nice and cool, and we’ve tied him to the end of a bullwhip for the first supersonic bee flight… Ready to hear the sonic boom? Unfortunately, our sonic bee will make more of a “crack” than a “boom.” He’s just a little bee after all, and although technically speaking, he’ll cause a sonic boom if he goes fast enough, it’s going to be a smaller, quieter sonic boom than what planes and space shuttles make.Īuthored by H.N. Thats twice as fast as a Peregrine Falcon. Maybe we could invent a metal bee-suit, and dip him in something that would keep him cool as he picks up speed… ![]() For the sake of our honeybee, we would only want him to be sonic-booming for a split second, and we would want to protect him. When something is moving that fast, all the wind around it pushes back on it and makes it heat up a lot (this is what destroyed the Space Shuttle Columbia back in 2003). So what would happen if we could somehow get a honeybee to move that fast? Well, the bee would probably not survive. Even the fastest animal on the planet, the peregrine falcon, can only get up to 200 miles per hour, far slower than the 770 miles per hour needed to create a sonic boom. Her arrival has come two weeks after another peregrine, GA, died after flying into a stationary car. Its pointed, sleek wings have an average span of 40 inches. The fastest people can reach speeds only twice as high as the bee’s. The peregrine falcon, nicknamed Edith, has been spotted flying around Norwich Cathedral. What Makes Peregrine Falcons Special The American peregrine falcon is a stunning creature in flight. That may look fast for such a little guy, but it’s not-and he’s not alone. Now, we’re engineers, not beekeepers, but we’ve heard a bee’s top speed is about 15 miles per hour. Peregrine Falcons produce a number of vocalizations that all serve various different purposes. A honeybee would definitely cause a sonic boom if it was moving fast enough, but the question is: can it move fast enough? ![]() Sure it can-but sadly, the bee isn’t likely to survive the experience…Īnything moving faster than the speed of sound (about 770 miles per hour) can create a sonic boom, including bullets, bullwhips-and yes, really fast bees. Guest Post from the Ask an Engineer series, published by MIT’s School of Engineering
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