The developer behind a slew of NASA's ‘Eyes On Asteroids’ Lets You See Exactly How Close They Come

Simulating Impacts With The Asteroid Launcher

Bright orange hues with a fiery texture are overlaid on a map of the tri-state area, with Brooklyn at the center, showing the fireball from an asteroid impact. Text on the side reveals the fireball is 8.3 miles wide,
Asteroid Launcher

Like any decent disaster movie, Asteroid Launcher is equal parts terrifying and enthralling. Were a 1,500-foot-wide iron asteroid traveling 38,000 mph to hit the center of Brooklyn, NY at a 45-degree angle, for example, the simulator shows there’d be catastrophic effects as far away as Pennsylvania and Connecticut. The resulting crater would be 5.6 miles wide, and nearly 700,000 people would be instantly “vaporized.” The fireball would stretch even farther, at 8.3 miles wide, leading to an estimated 9.8 million deaths. NASA’s asteroid deflection plan is starting to sound really nice right about now...

Agarwal’s tool also goes into detail about the shockwaves, tornado-force winds, and earthquakes that would occur after an asteroid strike. It isn’t for the faint of heart — but that hasn’t kept s from flocking to it since it dropped. On Twitter, Agarwal shared that there were “more than 25 asteroids being launched every second” on Tuesday, the day after its release. “I think I might hit Apple Map's rate limit soon,” he added.

Cultural Obsession With Disaster

Agarwal’s Asteroid Launcher is in many ways reminiscent of Alex Wellerstein’s get enough of these doomsday predictors.

Asteroid Launcher isn’t Agarwal’s only disaster-themed project. Earlier this fall, the coder released the tracker Days Since Incident which catalogs natural disasters across the globe, from tsunamis to earthquakes to solar flares. Another project, Universe Forecast, lays out the timeline of projected cataclysmic events in the universe’s future, like when “the sun eats the Earth” in about 7 billion years’ time, or when all eventually goes dark.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom; Agarwal’s site is home to an eclectic mix of projects, many of them geared toward the lighthearted and silly. It’s no wonder the website has become a favorite destination for so many online.

More: What Was The Asteroid Bennu Mission & What Does It Mean For Science?

Source: Asteroid Launcher, Neal Agarwal/Twitter, Neal.Fun, Days Since Incident, Universe Forecast, Nukemap