Effects of Dusty Debris on the Breakup of Idealized Meteoroids

Abstract

Meteorites have been revealed to be a common phenomenon that regularly impact the Earth, with the possibility of causing tremendous harm. There are too many meteorites in the solar system to ensure that all are detected, so a better approach is to prepare and model what happens when meteorites do collide with the Earth. This research looked into modeling meteorites in HyperTERP, a Mach 6 shock tunnel, as combinations of plastic spheres and corn starch, with the goal of understanding how the addition of powder affects the aerodynamics of the cluster. In particular, these experiments were focused on measuring the final mean lateral velocity for a given ratio of spheres and powder, which impacts how much energy is imparted into the atmosphere and the range of destruction. Fourteen sphere clusters were assembled within 15.2 mm diameter shells, forming clusters of both plastic spheres and corn starch powder, of which only the lateral velocities of the individual spheres were tracked. High speed schlieren imagery was used in order to capture the behavior of these hypersonic experiments before they were processed using MATLAB. The findings confirmed previous research, and showed that the presence of dust increased the mean lateral velocity of the whole cluster. In particular, it was demonstrated that one can model the presence of dust in a meteoroid cluster by modeling the additional dust as an equal mass of fragments within the cluster. These results demonstrate the amount by which adding dust to meteorite models increases the mean lateral velocity and energy released, which improves our understanding of the area over which meteorites pose a threat.