USATODAY.com – Supercomputer takes on a cosmic threat
A super-powerful computer has simulated what it might take to keep Earth safe from a menacing asteroid.
Researchers have utilized the number-crunching brainpower of Red Storm — a supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Red Storm, a Cray XT3 supercomputer, is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second performance mark — a measure that indicates the capacity of a network of processors to communicate with each other when dealing with the most complex situations — in both classified and unclassified realms.
The massively parallel computing simulations have modeled how much explosive power it would take to destroy or sidetrack an asteroid that’s got Earth in its cross-hairs.
Radar measurements
For the computer runs, asteroid 6489 Golevka was chosen. Golevka isn’t going to hit the Earth, explained Mark Boslough, a Sandia scientist and asteroid threat analyst. This particular asteroid was used as a “proxy” because solid geometry data about the object existed, he said.
Since its discovery in May 1991 by astronomer Eleanor Helin, asteroid Golevka has been repeatedly radar-scanned. It is roughly .33 mile (one half-kilometer) across, but tips the scales at about 460 billion pounds (210 billion kilograms), according to asteroid experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The Golevka asteroid has been a particular object of interest since 2003. That’s when NASA scientists discovered its course had changed.
Keeping tabs on Golevka has helped pin down the Yarkovsky Effect — a miniscule amount of force produced as the asteroid absorbs energy from the Sun and re-radiates it into space as heat. Over time — lots of it — that force can have a big effect on an asteroid’s orbit. [Read.On]