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Article says the center of the impact crater is (was?) around 30km deep. Curious how big they think the asteroid that caused this was. The article doesn't menti
by lordfrito 3y ago
Article says the center of the impact crater is (was?) around 30km deep. Curious how big they think the asteroid that caused this was. The article doesn't mention anything, and a lazy search online came up with nothing.
Wondering just how big of an asteriod this was, and how capable we are of seeing candidate asteroids of this size.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoWell the article and the title here on HN both says "520km in diameter", which gives an idea (although there's more than the diameter to estimate the damaged caused by an asteroid, but 520km in diameter is quite something).
- ceejayoz 3y agoThat's the crater diameter, which'll be much larger than the impactor.
- hu3 3y agohttp://simulator.down2earth.eu/planet.html?lang=en http://simulator.down2earth.eu/planet.html?lang=en According to this calculator you get a 446km diameter crater if you input: - 15km asteroid diameter - 90º Angle - 80km/s - Dense Rock asteroid - Hitting on Water at level 10m
- aintgonnatakeit 3y agoFYI these are the maximums you can input to get the largest possible crater using this simulator.
- hu3 3y agoYeah I had to max inputs on that calculator. Pretty wild.
- irrational 3y agoWe’re going to need a bigger calculator.
- FireBeyond 3y ago... not great, not terrible.
- jacquesm 3y agoHehe. That's a great scene. Meanwhile, I think it was big enough to do the job.
- jvm___ 3y ago15kms at 80km/s So, for a quarter of a second or less it was touching the ground and almost double the height of Everest (8.8kms).
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI wonder if just the atmosphere would've caused it to explode already. At those speeds it'd go through the atmosphere within a second though.
- Filligree 3y agoIt would be exploding for the duration, but at that size you just can’t get through much of the asteroid before it touches the ground.
- dylan604 3y agoThat's why "dense rock" setting was used. Imagine if they had selected "solid iron". I don't know what settings are available for the calculator used, but "loose bunch of rocks" would probably fall apart in the atmo, dense rock would hold together until impact, and solid iron would just keep burrowing further
- kijin 3y agoA 15km chunk of solid iron, now that's the kind of bunker buster you throw around in an interplanetary war. Would it do more damage to the surface than a rocky asteriod of comparable mass, though? If it burrows deeper, it means it transfers more of its energy to the mantle and core of the Earth, and less to the crust. It will be like a full metal jacket bullet that goes straight through the target and transfers most of its energy to the wall on the other side, versus a regular bullet that tumbles and expands as soon as it hits the target.
- davidwritesbugs 3y agoThrowing Meteors as interplanetary weapons was a storyline from The Expanse books/TV series if I recall.
- m3kw9 3y agoWould be wild if aliens had cameras on every planet and one day decides to show us what this looked like
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoLittle grey dudes sitting us down in the slideshow room to show their holiday pictures from a few million years ago, lol. "And this is when ⌘⑩⌖⌦ nearly got eaten by a dinosaur!"