SCIENCE
Purdue unveils 'Impact: Earth!' asteroid impact effects calculator - page 3
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The results screen shows users the likely scenario of their impact, including crater size, seismic effects, air blast, energy equivalent and global damage. (Information Technology at Purdue image/Michele Rund)
"This calculator is a critical tool for determining the potential consequences of an impact," said Spray, who also runs the Earth Impacts Database of confirmed impact craters. "It is widely used by government and scientific agencies, as well as impact research groups and space enthusiasts throughout the world."
In the week after the first impacts effects calculator launched there were 10 million hits from around the world. Today governmental agencies link to and use the site, including the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Air Force. The program is available in multiple languages and also is used by foreign governmental agencies, Melosh said.
"It is a valuable tool to quantify the important impact processes that might affect the people, buildings and landscape in the vicinity of an impact event," he said. "With the program we include a scientific paper that describes the approximations and equations and discusses the uncertainty in our predictions. One can delve as much into the science as they would like."
The calculator also has been a valuable tool in sparking young students' interest in science, Melosh said.
"The calculator has been used by teachers and students from kindergarten through high school both for school projects and for fun," he said. "At one point we debated whether or not to use scientific notation in the results, but a teacher asked us to keep it. She told us that it inspired her class and the students worked hard to learn the method so they could fully understand the results."
The ''Impact:Earth!'' calculator website was developed by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), which develops online tools to support learning and scientific discovery, including the nationally acclaimed classroom technologies HotSeat and Mixable. The site will be updated with additional features in coming months, according to the team.
Melosh is part of the science team of NASA's EPOXI mission that will be evaluating the comet Hartley 2 on Thursday (Nov. 4). The mission uses the Deep Impact spacecraft that will fly to within 434 miles of the comet. This will be only the fifth time in history that a spacecraft has been close enough to take images of a comet's center.
"Comets and asteroids have become a part of our popular culture, but we don't really know a lot about their composition and internal processes as they fly through space," Melosh said. "We have much more to learn about these objects that are often our closest neighbors in space. We do know that sometimes they enter into a collision course with the Earth, and this site offers an authoritative place to go to learn about the detailed effects of an impact."
The older version of the impact calculator, which may be easier to use for those with a slow Internet connection or older computer, is available at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk