A game developer has released an application that allows you to simulate an asteroid impact anywhere on Earth.

It is well known that our ancestors, the Gauls, feared only one thing: that the sky might fall on their heads. You might smile, but that is exactly what could happen one day, and it has already led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Try to imagine a large asteroid crashing into planet Earth. The website Asteroid Launcher has now developed an app that allows you to simulate an asteroid impact anywhere on Earth.

Everything can be adjusted on the website: the size of the asteroid, its speed and the angle of the impact. So we couldn't resist the temptation to send an earth drill to Luxembourg.

Considerable damage

A large rock with a diameter of one kilometre would hit the Luxembourg capital at a speed of 17 km per second.

And the result would be terrible:

  • The collision would cause a crater 18 km wide and 700 m deep. 140,794 people would be "vaporised" immediately.

  • The impact would be equivalent to the explosion of 95 gigatons of TNT. That is 95,000,000,000 tons of this explosive. That is more energy than the earth consumes in an entire year.

  • The fireball that the impact would cause would be 29 km long alone.

  • 6,003,749 people would be killed by this fireball.

  • 6,910,665 people would suffer third-degree burns and more than 15 million people would suffer second-degree burns.

  • Clothing would catch fire up to 142 km from the impact and trees would burn up to 256 km from the impact.

  • Houses would collapse within a 265 km radius of the impact.

  • The force of the impact would be equivalent to a storm travelling at over 14,000 km/h.

RTL

© Capture d'écran Asteroid Launcher

A planned scenario

About 30,000 asteroids of all sizes -- including more than 850 with a size of 1 km or more -- have been catalogued in the Earth's vicinity. None of them threaten our planet in the next 100 years.

Except they're not all catalogued.

According to Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, "between 20 and 50" large NEOs have yet to be discovered. "Most of them are in orbits that make them difficult to find, such as orbits that keep them inside (the) Earth and make them difficult to see because of the brightness of the Sun," he explained.

To prepare for a bad discovery, Nasa conducted a test mission in late September: A spacecraft was catapulted against a non-hazardous asteroid to prove it was possible to change its trajectory.

Video in French