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Airburst Modeling

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Book cover Handbook of Cosmic Hazards and Planetary Defense

Abstract

Computational models are used to gain insight about the phenomena associated with airbursts caused by the hypervelocity entry, ablation, breakup, and explosion of asteroids and comets in planetary atmospheres. Among the resulting discoveries has been the recognition that airbursts caused by downwardly directed collisions do more damage at the surface than a nuclear explosion of the same yield. They are therefore more dangerous than previously thought. At Sandia National Laboratories, the multidimensional, multi-material shock-physics code, CTH, has been run on high-performance computers using adaptive mesh refinement to resolve phenomena across spatial scales over many orders of magnitude. These simulations have led to the discovery of unexpected phenomena that emerge from the highly directed geometry of these events, such as ballistic plumes that rise to low Earth orbital altitudes before collapsing, ring vortices that descend to the surface and add to the list of damage mechanisms, and the splitting of shallow entry wakes into linear vortices that become visible as twin condensation trails. As scientific understanding has improved, these models are ready to be focused on systematic, high-fidelity, multiscale, multi-physics-based quantitative risk assessments to objectively inform policy decisions associated with planetary defense.

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Acknowledgments

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. This work was funded by Sandia’s LDRD program and by NASA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, 87122, USA

    Mark Boslough

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  1. Mark Boslough
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Correspondence to Mark Boslough .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. US Department of Defense, Albuquergue, New Mexico, USA

    Firooz Allahdadi

  2. Arlington, Virginia, USA

    Joseph N. Pelton

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Boslough, M. (2014). Airburst Modeling. In: Allahdadi, F., Pelton, J. (eds) Handbook of Cosmic Hazards and Planetary Defense. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02847-7_56-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02847-7_56-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02847-7

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