Fire in the Sky: the physics and consequences of asteroid airbursts

 

On July 1st, 2019, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) will organize a talk given by Dr. Mark Boslough: "Fire in the Sky: the physics and consequences of asteroid airbursts" at the LIST Belvaux site.

In July 1994, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter, one-by-one, over a period of several days. Unlike our home planet, Jupiter has no solid surface. The gas giant is fluid all the way down to the core, so there were no crater-forming impacts. The enormous pressures and temperatures of the collisions converted the kinetic energy of each object into explosive energy, leading to gigantic airbursts that could be observed from Earth.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of this historic event, we  celebrate its significance to the field of planetary defense. Policy makers and the public began to take the impact threat seriously, and scientists recognized that airbursts on Earth were a major contributor to the impact threat. This presentation will discuss what we have learned about the physics of terrestrial airbursts over the last quarter century. This knowledge has enabled us to model airburst consequences in support of risk assessment and tabletop exercises, such as our 2019 Planetary Defense Conference event in which we modeled the destruction of Denver and New York City.

Please find below more details on M. Boslough:

Dr. Mark Boslough is the Chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel (ADXP). He received his BS in Physics from Colorado State University in 1977 and his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech 1983. He was member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories from 1983 until his retirement in 2017. At Sandia, he worked on many aspects of planetary impact physics, including Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact models, formation of the Libyan Desert of Egypt, the 1908 Tunguska explosion, the 2008 TC3 airburst over Sudan, and impacts on Jupiter in 2010 and 2012. He served on the asteroid mitigation panel and coauthored the NRC report “Defending Planet Earth” in 2010. He was the first US scientist to visit the site of the 2013 Chelyabinsk airburst, as a participant in a NOVA documentary. His simulation of that event appeared on the covers of Nature in November, 2013, and Physics Today in September, 2014. He provided information and simulations of airbursts for disaster scenarios for FEMA tabletop exercises in 2013, 2014, and 2016, and helped develop impact scenarios for Planetary Defense Conferences in Flagstaff, Arizona (2013), Frascati, Italy (2015) and Tokyo, Japan (2017). He has appeared in dozens of science documentaries and television shows.