3 ms·

honest question: if a golf cart sized spacecraft ejected 1M Kg out of this asteroid, if it had hypothetically hit the earth's atmosphere, would it have broken u

• fwlr 4y ago
  It’s likely that the gigagram of ejecta is in some sense the “easiest” 1M kgs to knock out. I doubt it’s boulders and loosely compacted gravel all the way down.
• aidenn0 4y ago
  Perhaps turning it into 43000 1M kg sized rocks? If even a few hit that seems still pretty "civilization ending" to nme.
  • vkou 4y ago
    Depending on the impact velocity, it would be ~10-30 times the energy of the Tunguska meteor, or ~3-10 times the energy of the Tsar Bomba. Anyone within one or two hundred miles of the impact site would have an incredibly bad day, but it's not civilization-ending. The Chelyabinsk meteor, FYI, weighed ~12M KG.
• vkou 4y ago
  The asteroid weighs ~4.310^9 KG. If the impact speed were ~30 km/s [1], breaking it up in the atmosphere through friction would create about... E = MV^2/2 = 3.87 10^18 joules. For contrast, the energy released by the Tsar bomba was 2.45 * 10^17 joules. The Tunguska meteor impact was something on the order of ~1 * 10^17 joules. Even if much of the energy dissipates in the upper atmosphere, and does so over multiple seconds, I'd say that anyone within ~150 miles of the point of 'impact' will likely have a very, very, very bad day. [1] Which is a pretty bad case. The Chelyabinsk meteor was traveling at ~18 km/s - a 30 km/s impact would be close to a 'head-on' collision.
• Symmetry 4y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. This was a sudden impulse to one point on the asteroid but reentry would be a gradually increasing force across the whole leading edge.