The bloodhound is a large, brown, lovable pooch that is known for it's keen sense of smell. The Bloodhound SSC is NOT a large, brown, lovable pooch that is known for its keen sense of smell. The Bloodhound SSC is the most complex racing car on the planet. This car can travel up to 1,000 miles per hour. Its less of a car however and more of a jet with 4 wheels attached to it. But nonetheless, the Bloodhound SSC is the fastest land vehicle in the world. The Bloodhound SSC has a rocket that reaches temperatures hotter than a volcano. Each of it's 4 enormous wheels spin 170 times a second. The engine in the Bloodhound SSC has 135,000 horsepower. This car is able to travel an entire mile in only 3.6 seconds.

The SSC part of the Bloodhound SSC stands for Super Sonic Car. This car can travel faster than the speed of sound. The significance of traveling the speed of sound is in the interference patterns. The noise that the engine makes produces a sound wave. As you probably know, when an object is still and producing a sound, the sound waves look something like the diagram labeled "stationary". When an object is moving less than the speed of sound and producing a sound, the wave patterns look something like the diagram labeled "subsonic". The tighter areas of the sound waves produce a higher pitched sound, and the farther apart waves produce a lower pitched sound. This is boring. The fun stuff happens the instant the object reaches 340 m/s,. Hundreds of sound waves all gather at the tip of the source because the sound waves cant move fast enough to escape the source. This creates an enormous amount of constructive interference, or a really loud noise. that noise is called a sonic boom. The same sonic boom happens when an object moves faster than the speed of sound, only the constructive interference is located in a cone shape behind the object ("supersonic" diagram). The cone is referred to as the Mach cone. Anywhere outside the mach cone is the zone of silence. A sonic boom is roughly 200 decibels. For comparison, a shotgun blast is 150 decibels, a clap of thunder is 120 decibels, and that freaking vacuum cleaner that my mother is always using while I'm doing my homework is (a deafening) 88 decibels. 

The ratio of an objects speed over the speed of sound is known as the Mach number. this can be written as M=v/c. Mach .5 is half the speed of sound, Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound, and so on. The Bloodhound SSC has a Mach number of 1.31. There's another physics concept known as the Mach angle. the mach angle is the angle between the direction of the velocity, and the sound wave (referred to in the diagram on the right as the Mach Line). The equation for calculating the Mach angle is sin^-1(c/v) = 0. The smaller the Mach angle, the faster the object is travelling. The Mach angle of the Bloodhound SSC is only 49.5^o. 

The Bloodhound SSC is a remarkable piece of technology. the Bloodhound team is constantly making new discoveries and innovations every day. The Bloodhound Project is all about helping underprivileged children engage in science, technology, engineering, and math. You can support the Bloodhound Project through donations, and have your name on the fin of the car. The Bloodhound SSC team is also looking for a software engineer, for those that are interested. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/support-us#form

http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/news/join-team-software-engineer-needed

http://physics.info/shock/