Asteroid Impact Animations

You might have heard about a couple of big movies about asteroids which are heading towards the cinemas this summer. Great, finally my science gets recognised as a good subject for a real disaster movie.

I'm not going to take sides about which movie is the best but having seen the trailers I was prompted to try and produce a more accurate image of what an asteroid impact might look like. The Trailer for Deep Impact shows a very impressive impact , presumably using the latest , cutting edge hollywood special effects. But using what hollywood probably thought looked good everything happenes about 100 times too fast.

Impact Sequence From 'Deep Impact'

1997 XF 11 - The Real Thing?

Also recently there has been the 'scare' regarding the close approach of 1997XF11 in 2028 so I wanted to do something similar to what might happen if it really did hit - so I wanted a 1 mile object, travelling at about 18kilometers pers second on impact.

So here I present an ongoing effort to make something a little more realistic using a cutting edge OS (Linux - as used in Titanic - It's nice to know I had a hand in making that film ;-) a cutting edge free raytracer (povray) and some other bits and bobs.

Links

• Linux - Free Unix Clone
• Povray - Free Raytracer
• Titanic - impressive movie - some effects used computers running Linux
• Deep Impact - Big asteroid disaster movie from Dreamworks
• Armageddon - Another Big Movie with an even bigger NEO (not working yet - try Touchstone's site in the meantime.
• The Minor Planet Centre - Where asteroid discoveries are confirmed.
• Spacewatch - The Project which discovered 1997 XF11
• Jim Scotti - The guy credited with the discovery.