Tracking Worldwide Dangers

While better warning systems will probably be implemented, it's difficult to predict tsunamis — essentially, large, fast moving waves — since they are often caused by earthquakes and undersea volcanic eruptions.

But as devastating as the Boxing Day tsunami was — more than 200,000 dead as we go to press — a different kind of tsunami could kill far more people. A "mega-tsunami" featuring half-mile high waves that travel nearly 400 miles an hour could be generated by a large asteroid that strikes an ocean. (Although the crest of the wave would quickly reduce to about 450 yards high, the impact of a one kilometer iron asteroid, equivalent to 1.5 trillion tons of TNT, could also kick up a water geyser 12 miles high.)

We know this because researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and SAIC scientist Michael Gittings created simulations a few years ago — several different scenarios — showing asteroids hitting the ocean at 45,000 miles an hour. (The simulations featured asteroids of different size, composition, and angle of entry.) The hydrocode they developed, known as SAGE (SAIC's adaptive grid Eulerian), is important science and has potential value in predicting and planning emergency response, according to Los Alamos National Laboratory literature.

But how likely is it that such an asteroid would hit the Earth (which is more than 70 percent covered by ocean)? According to a Los Alamos Laboratory researcher (in an Associated Press article), "Every 10,000 years or so, we should get a tsunami from an asteroid, and we haven't had one in about that amount of time… it's a hard thing to calculate because we don't know how many asteroids are out there."

SAIC, however, is helping the University of Hawaii build a telescope and data management system to search for dangerous asteroids. Called the panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system (Pan-STARRS), the system will survey the entire sky every three to four nights for 10 years.

While the full-scale Pan-STARRS system is anticipated to be comprised of an array of four 1.8-meter telescopes, a single-telescope prototype is scheduled to become operational in January 2006. When fully developed, Pan-STARRS will generate an estimated three terabytes of raw data each night of observation. These "small" telescopes will image an area 30 to 40 times bigger than the full moon in a single exposure. (Pan-STARRS will employ a variety of motion detection technologies to extract moving objects from the billion objects observed each week.)

According to SAIC program manager Dr. Julie Rosen, Pan-STARRS will "push the search envelope" and will find nearly 100 percent of kilometer-size asteroids and most objects greater than 300 meters in diameter.

"Combining the array of telescopes with billion-pixel cameras and sophisticated data storage and mining capabilities creates a surveying resource more powerful than all existing telescopes combined," said Dr. John Wick, the project's consulting engineer.

Approximately 10 terabytes of processed data will result from one week's observations, and the catalog of detected objects will have nearly one billion entries. Over its lifetime, Pan-STARRS will generate 40 petabytes of data. "This will be the largest astronomy data management system ever," said Wayne Smith, the project's systems engineer.

In addition, researchers will use data from Pan-STARRS to address scientific questions ranging from the origins of the solar system to properties of the universe. (Pan-STARRS users will access the data at the Maui High Performance Computing Center via high-speed links.)

If you're still wondering about the harmful effects of a meteor big enough to cause worldwide devastation, take a look at the Chicxulub crater just off the Yucatan peninsula. That 10-kilometer monster kicked up so much water vapor and debris into the atmosphere that it blocked sunlight for months. (In fact, it had the energy of 300 million nuclear weapons and created temperatures hotter than on the sun's surface.) This probably killed off 50 percent of Earth's plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.

Related Information

• Simulation