美国数学建模竞赛特等奖论文——1999 A O The Sky is Falling【数学建模】.pdfVIP

The Sky is Falling! 263 The Sky is Falling! Daniel Forrest Garrett Aufdemberg Murray Johnson University of Puget Sound Tacoma, WA 98416 Advisor: Perry Fizzano Assumptions 1. The diameter () of the asteroid at impact is 1,000 m. Heat and stress while traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere would cause some portion to va- porize or burn before impact. However, for an object this large traveling at speeds typical of cosmic objects impacting the earth, one can ignore the deceleration and ablation (loss of mass from the surface of an object due to frictional forces) due to the atmosphere [Steel 1995, 178]. 2. The asteroid strikes the earth at the geographic South Pole. 3. The asteroid is spherical. 4. The asteroid is homogeneous with uniform density g/cm; uniform density allows for simple estimates of the mass. The value of is typical of C- type (carbonaceous) asteroids, which make up the majority of the asteroids in the solar system and therefore are the most likely type to strike earth, and also within the typical range of densities of S-type (stony) asteroids, which make up a majority of the asteroids with orbits that cross the Earth’s orbit [Morrison and Owen 1996, 103–132]. Preliminary Calculations Mass of the Asteroid The mass of the asteroid ( ) is its density () multiplied by its volume ( ). For a spherical asteroid, the mass is given by c The UMAP Journal 20 (3) (1999) 263–268. Copyright 1999 by COMAP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice. Abstracting with credit is permitted, but copyrights for components of this work owned by others than CO