If you’re concerned about incoming asteroids smacking into the Earth, now you can calculate ahead of time the calamity a comet or space rock would cause if it hit our home planet.
Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana have unveiled Impact: Earth! This interactive, user-friendly website offers parameters such as: diameter of the impact object, its density and velocity, the object’s angle of entry and where it will hit the Earth.
Given those values, the site then estimates the consequences of its impact, including the atmospheric blast wave, ground shaking, size of tsunami generated, fireball expansion, as well as distribution of debris and size of the crater produced.
Jay Melosh, distinguished professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and physics at Purdue, led the creation of the impact effects calculator.
“Fairly large events happen about once a century,” Melosh said in a press statement.
“The biggest threat in our near future is the asteroid Apophis, which has a small chance of striking the Earth in 2036. It is about one-third of a mile in diameter, and the calculator will tell what will happen if it should fall in your backyard,” Melosh added.
Potential consequences
“This calculator is a critical tool for determining the potential consequences of an impact,” said John Spray, director of the planetary and space science center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He also runs the Earth Impacts Database of confirmed impact craters.
The calculator is widely used by government and scientific agencies, as well as impact research groups and space enthusiasts throughout the world, Spray noted.
According to Melosh, comets and asteroids have become a part of our popular culture, but we don’t really know a lot about their composition and internal processes as they fly through space.
“We have much more to learn about these objects that are often our closest neighbors in space,” Melosh said. “We do know that sometimes they enter into a collision course with the Earth, and this site offers an authoritative place to go to learn about the detailed effects of an impact.”
Try the calculator out for yourself !
The calculator is available at http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
By Leonard David