Deep Impact?
On 15 February 2013, the Russian district of Chelyabinsk, with a population of more than 1 million, suffered the impact and atmospheric explosion of a 20-meter-wide asteroid—the largest impact on Earth by an asteroid since 1908.
Popova
et al.
(p.
1069
, published online 7 November; see the Perspective by
Chapman
) provide a comprehensive description of this event and of the body that caused it, including detailed information on the asteroid orbit and atmospheric trajectory, damage assessment, and meteorite recovery and characterization.
Abstract. Meteor observations and crater field investigations support the view that some meteoroids undergo fragmentation into a finite number of splinters which move a long distance without further disruption. The motion of these fragments cannot be described in the frame of liquid-like models. The primary purpose of this study is to achieve some success in improving the alternative model of separate fragments, which is based on studying the motion of a finite number of fragments interacting with each other through the air pressure. The three-dimensional (3-D) numerical technique is elaborated for the direct modeling of the flow around several arbitrarily arranged fragments. The model allows us to calculate the ablation mass rate and aerodynamic loading for each fragment. The new approach (hybrid model) based on the simultaneous solution of the 3-D hydrodynamic equations for the airflow and the differential equations for the motion of discrete particles is proposed to study the debris cloud evolution, taking into account successive fragmentation. The simplified version of this model was applied to the Sikhote-Alin meteorite shower, Bene•ov bolide, and small meteoroids' impacts against the Martian surface.
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