Asteroid Launcher simulator lets you destroy your hometown
Today, astronomers are monitoring more than 2,200 potentially dangerous people asteroids larger than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in diameter, in Earth’s orbital neighborhood. Fortunately, it’s rare that one gets close enough to pose a real threat. But that also means that anyone interested in seeing what would happen if a space rock that big hit our planet would have to settle for killing dinosaurs. Chixculub asteroid impact 66 million years ago.
come in Asteroid launcher (opens in a new tab), a new web app that gives asteroid impact fans a chance to answer some of their questions. Our friends at PC Gamer called out the app “Morbidly informative” for users.
Easy to use Asteroid Launcher. You can choose from several different compositions of space rock (asteroids made of iron, stone, carbon, or gold, or a comet) and select its diameter (up to a mile), impact speed, and impact angle . Then select ground zero on a map, anywhere in the world, and press “Launch Asteroid”.
There is more than one way an asteroid impact can kill. The asteroid launcher captures several: not just the size of the crater, but the size of the fireball, the shock wave, the destructive winds, and the earthquake that would spread from the impact.
So let’s say I drop a similar asteroid 99942 Apophis, scheduled to pass (but not hit) Earth in 2029, right over downtown Los Angeles. (Sorry LA)
According to Asteroid Launcher, this impact would leave a crater 7.5 kilometers wide and the fireball would burn most of the city, leaving more than 5.5 million people dead. The following shock wave would shatter human eardrums as far away as Pomona or Santa Clarita, 27 miles away. Tornado-force winds would bring down trees as far away as San Bernardino or Ventura, 108 km away. And a magnitude 6.9 earthquake would shake the ground as far as Bakersfield or San Diego, 120 miles away.
Asteroid Launcher is the work of programmer Neil Agarwhal, who based the application on various scientists. academic (opens in a new tab) work (opens in a new tab) intended to calculate the effects of an asteroid impact. It resembles Nukemap (opens in a new tab)a website created by science historian Alex Wellerstein in 2012 that simulates the effects of dropping a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world.
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