Dr. Donald Korycansky and collaborators will carry out simulations of atmospheric impacts and cratering on the surfaces of bodies in the solar system using state-of-the-art methods. The calculations will yield an understanding of the crucial aspects of the impacts and build on previous work on this problem by these researchers. This work has three foci: 1) Differentiating among models of atmospheric impacts which have been proposed for this problem, 2) Connecting the effects of atmospheres on impacts (i.e. ablation and fragmentation) with craters on planetary and satellite surfaces (Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan), and 3) Implementing a high-quality material failure and fracture model for impactors into the hydrocode SAGE that will be used. A number of simulations will be carried out of the impact of objects into planetary atmospheres and the formation of craters by fragmented impactors. The latter calculations will be calibrated by comparison with experimental results from the scientific literature. The new calculations largely involve the use of the computer code SAGE, developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SAGE is a powerful and flexible code that simulates hydrodynamic processes. It employs high-quality algorithms for the basic dynamics and can model important and relevant physics such as material strength. It also contains an adaptive mesh routine that concentrates computational resources efficiently. It can be run on computer clusters, to which this research team has access, comprising 80 processors in total.
The SAGE code mentioned above is flexibly configured for a wide variety of projects. The code is easy to run and easy to configure for new problems, which may be significant research projects in their own right. As such it is well suited for student involvement in research. This includes not only graduate students, but also undergraduates that are following the Planetary Science Path as part of their work for the Earth Sciences major at UC Santa Cruz. More broadly, the results of this research project should shed light on a complicated phenomenon, atmospheric impact, that has wide implications for society. Given the widely perceived vulnerability of human society to impact hazard, any knowledge that sheds light on the process is helpful. ***
