This Asteroid Launcher simulator lets you destroy your hometown — or anywhere else - Space.com

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This representation shows the effects of a 1600-foot asteroid hitting the Space.com offices successful New York City, creating a 5.8-mile crater and a fireball astir 9 miles across. (Image credit: Neal Agarwal)

Today, astronomers are monitoring implicit 2,200 perchance hazardous asteroids larger than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across, successful Earth’s orbital neighborhood. Fortunately, it’s uncommon that immoderate volition walk adjacent capable to airs a existent threat. But that besides means anybody funny successful seeing what would hap if a abstraction stone that large happened to onslaught our satellite indispensable settee for the dino-killing Chixculub asteroid impact 66 millions of years ago.

Enter Asteroid Launcher (opens successful caller tab), a caller web app that gives asteroid interaction fanatics a changeable astatine answering immoderate of their questions. Our friends astatine PC Gamer called the app "morbidly informative" for users.

Asteroid Launcher straightforward to use. You tin take from respective antithetic compositions of abstraction stone — asteroids made from iron, stone, carbon, oregon gold, oregon a comet — and prime its diameter (up to a mile), interaction speed, and interaction angle. Then, you prime crushed zero connected a map, anyplace successful the world, and property "Launch Asteroid."

There is much than 1 mode an asteroid interaction tin kill. Asteroid Launcher captures respective of them: not conscionable the size of the crater, but that of the fireball, the shockwave, the destructive winds and the earthquake that would each dispersed from impact.

So, accidental I driblet an asteroid akin to 99942 Apophis, scheduled to walk (but not hit) Earth successful 2029, close atop downtown Los Angeles. (Sorry, L.A.)

According to Asteroid Launcher, that interaction would permission a crater 4.7 miles (7.5 kilometers) wide, and the fireball would pain astir of the metropolis — leaving implicit 5.5 cardinal radical dead. The ensuing shockwave would rupture quality eardrums arsenic acold arsenic Pomona oregon Santa Clarita, 27 miles (43 km) away. Tornado-force winds would teardrop down trees arsenic acold arsenic San Bernardino oregon Ventura, 67 miles (108 km) away. And a magnitude 6.9 earthquake would shingle the crushed arsenic acold arsenic Bakersfield oregon San Diego, 119 miles (191 km) away.

Asteroid Launcher is the enactment of coder Neil Agarwhal, who based the app connected respective scientists’ academic (opens successful caller tab) work (opens successful caller tab) aimed astatine calculating the effects of an asteroid impact. It resembles Nukemap (opens successful caller tab), a website created by subject historiographer Alex Wellerstein successful 2012 that simulates the effects of dropping a atomic limb anyplace successful the world.

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Rahul Rao is simply a postgraduate of New York University's SHERP and a freelance subject writer, regularly covering physics, space, and infrastructure. His enactment has appeared in Gizmodo, Popular Science, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, and Continuum. He enjoys riding trains for fun, and helium has seen each surviving occurrence of Doctor Who. He holds a masters grade successful subject penning from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and earned a bachelors grade from Vanderbilt University, wherever helium studied English and physics.

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