Statistics – Computation
Scientific paper
Oct 1998
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998aps..4cf..j102c&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, Four Corners Section Fall Meeting, October 16-17, 1998 Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, abstract
Statistics
Computation
Scientific paper
Of the 140 impact craters known on the surface of Earth, the most famous was created about 65 million years ago when a 10 km asteroid or comet came down in shallow water near the present day town of Chicxulub, Mexico. With a kinetic energy equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, the impact event lofted enough debris onto globe-straddling trajectories to flash heat much of the surface of the Earth and then darken the skies for several years. Numerous investigations have demonstrated that such an event, which happens, on average, every 100 million years, caused extreme stress on Earth's climate and most likely led to the extinction of many species. Computational simulations demonstrate that more numerous asteroids or comets as small as 1 km in diameter, impacting, on average, every 300,000 years may be globally catastrophic. Indeed, the odds of an individual dying from a relatively frequent 1 km impacting object (about 1 in 10,000) are substantially greater than from the impact of an infrequent dinosaur killer (1 in 1,000,000). What can we do to reduce the hazard from impacting comets and asteroids? First, we should find what's out there with our name on it. Only about 10 percent of the potential Earth-crossing asteroids have been found. Even at the greatly increased detection rate of recent years, it will be several decades before we've found 90 percent of the Earth-crossers. Second, we should learn everything we can about the physical, compositional and mechanical properties of asteroids and comets. A recent computational study demonstrated that weakly bound asteroids (little more than rubble piles) are easier to break than deflect(E. Asphaug, S. J. Ostro, R. S. Hudson, D. J. Scheeres and W. Benz (1998), Nature, Vol. 393, pp. 437-440.). Is this an advantage or disadvantage? Third, we should study potential means of mitigating the hazard by deflecting the object while still in space or evacuating affected regions (such as coastlines) of the Earth. Because the detection time prior to impact may be months (long period comet) to years (asteroid or short period comet several orbits prior to impact), it is possible that we may not have much time to perform such studies if faced with an actual threat.
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