Things falling from space are always cool, it especially helps when some kind person has taken a hell of a lot of data and made a great visualisation of it all.
"BOLIDES is an attempt to visualize and explore the meteorites that have collided with the Earth. The visualization focuses mainly on meteorites that were eye-witnessed when falling and hitting the ground." There's loads more info on the site. Give it a read, it's pretty cool.
If you like it, check out every recorded meteorite strike on earth. Same sort of thing but different.
Came across Damage Map today. I've been 'playing' with it for ages. It's so fucking cool.
Created by Gareth Collins, Robert Marcus and H. Jay Melosh at Imperial College London, it is, "an easy-to-use, interactive web site for estimating the regional environmental consequences of an impact on Earth. This program will estimate the ejecta distribution, ground shaking, atmospheric blast wave, and thermal effects of an impact as well as the size of the crater produced."
Yes please.
You choose your location of impact (either coordinates or from a list of cities), diameter, density, velocity, impact angle, and then the target type (rock, water etc). I chose London, diameter of 30m, density of 8000kg, velocity of 17km/s (the 'typical speed of impact'), and a 50° impact angle. This is what happened.
The crater!
The air blast.
The ejecta.
Seismic shaking.
Now excuse me while I up my density to 80,000, my diameter to 200m, and my angle of velocity to 90°.
