Nyan Cat’s Rainbow Moves The Feline Pop-Tart At Mach 7

An 8-bit Pop-Tart kitty moves twice as fast as the fastest jet ever created. That’s because this cosmic cat, this ubiquitous meme, has to take off and land adorably in space. And what better place to take off and land from than the giant litter box that is the undisturbed regolith of the Moon? If Nyan Cat landed on the Moon to do its business, the strawberry-flavored critter would eventually have to get off the surface—it would have to escape the Moon’s gravitational pull. Like how rockets on Earth must do, Nyan Cat would have to reach the escape velocity of the Moon. This critical speed is dependent on the mass and size of the object producing the pull, as well as a defined gravitational constant. For the Moon, this turns about to be about 2,375 meters per second—or around seven times the speed of sound in air. That little ...