Posted on Mar 4, 2019 in Astronomy, News, Science
“Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?” says Charles El Mir at Johns Hopkins University. It may sound like science fiction, but NASA’s recent discovery of a possible impact crater 22-miles wide buried under more than a mile of ice in Greenland begs the question: if there’s an asteroid coming at earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction. “And if the latter,” Mir adds, “how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break?”
Keep in mind that the Chicxulub asteroid 66 million years ago that brought the dinosaur epoch to its brutal conclusion was a mere 14-kilometers wide, “compressing the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun, hitting Earth with enough force enough to lift a mountain back into space at escape velocity, writes Peter Brannen in Ends of the World.
The ‘Liquid’ Asteroid –That Ushered in the Rise of Homo Sapiens
A popular theme in the movies is that of an incoming asteroid that could extinguish life on the planet, and our heroes are launched into space to blow it up. But incoming asteroids may be harder to break than scientists previously thought, finds a Johns Hopkins study that used a new understanding of rock fracture and a new computer modeling method to simulate asteroid collisions.
The findings, to be published in the March 15 print issue of Icarus, can aid in the creation of asteroid impact and deflection strategies, increase understanding of solar system formation and help design asteroid mining efforts.
“We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws. Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered,” says Charles El Mir, a recent Ph.D graduate from the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the paper’s first author.
“Impact” -The Asteroid That Towered a Mile Above the Cruising Altitude of a 747
Researchers understand physical materials like rocks at a laboratory scale (about the size of your fist), but it has been difficult to translate this understanding to city-size objects like asteroids. In the early 2000s, a different research team created a computer model into which they input various factors such as mass, temperature, and material brittleness, and simulated an asteroid about a kilometer in diameter striking head-on into a 25-kilometer diameter target asteroid at an impact velocity of five kilometers per second. Their results suggested that the target asteroid would be completely destroyed by the impact.
In the new study, El Mir and his colleagues, K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and Derek Richardson, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, entered the same scenario into a new computer model called the Tonge-Ramesh model, which accounts for the more detailed, smaller-scale processes that occur during an asteroid collision. Previous models did not properly account for the limited speed of cracks in the asteroids.
The simulation was separated into two phases: a short-timescale fragmentation phase and a long-timescale gravitational reaccumulation phase. The first phase considered the processes that begin immediately after an asteroid is hit, processes that occur within fractions of a second. The second, long-timescale phase considers the effect of gravity on the pieces that fly off the asteroid’s surface after the impact, with gravitational reaccumulation occurring over many hours after impact.
In the first phase, after the asteroid was hit, millions of cracks formed and rippled throughout the asteroid, parts of the asteroid flowed like sand, and a crater was created. This phase of the model examined the individual cracks and predicted overall patterns of how those cracks propagate. The new model showed that the entire asteroid is not broken by the impact, unlike what was previously thought. Instead, the impacted asteroid had a large damaged core that then exerted a strong gravitational pull on the fragments in the second phase of the simulation.
“Day the Earth Changed” –Unveiled by a Young 31-Kilometer-Wide Greenland Crater
The research team found that the end result of the impact was not just a “rubble pile” – a collection of weak fragments loosely held together by gravity. Instead, the impacted asteroid retained significant strength because it had not cracked completely, indicating that more energy would be needed to destroy asteroids. Meanwhile, the damaged fragments were now redistributed over the large core, providing guidance to those who might want to mine asteroids during future space ventures.
“We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago,” says Ramesh. “It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat. We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes – and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions.”
The Daily Galaxy, Andy Johnson via Johns Hopkins University
An artist‘s depiction of a meteorite headed toward northwest Greenland. Natural History Museum of Denmark/Cryospheric Sciences Lab/ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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