Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Down to earth, and not in a good way

A leftover from January's Armageddon week on the History Channel; an asteroid impact simulator. You can specify the density of a projectile, speed, angle of entry, and other variables, and it'll show you what happens if it hits the earth. There's a display page with geek info like kinetic energy, burst altitude, and fireball radius, which can be quite impressive if you're talking 1000 meter wide iron chunks. For the non-geek, there are visual displays, you can drop the Empire State building in the crater to see the depth. It's an interesting exercise in applied physics to alter the specs and see what happens.


The best feature is a google map display where you can pinpoint the point of impact and see the resulting crater. I personally like to target Paris. I never did like the French.