Monday, April 12, 2004

Asteroid Impact Simulator 

Robert Roy Britt on Space.com has an article detailing the new online catastrophe calculator at the University of Arizona. It took a while for the page to load, so it would appear that the Earth Impact Effects Program is quite popular already. Once on, you enter in the distance from impact and the impact parameters of velocity, projectile and target density (enter manually or select from a list), angle and diameter. The results also take a while, but are quite detailed. There are also links for further information on each section.

Note that at the bottom of the results page is the following disclaimer: "These results come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY." So if there's an object coming in and you're vaporized despite having used this tool to calculate minimum safe distance, don't go crying to the tool designers.

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Posted by Rogueslayer at 1:05 PM