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Cake day: December 17th, 2023

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  • I agree it’s not big at all. Also there’s a 2/3 chance it goes into the ocean not creating any crater at all.

    I just ran some scenarios through AI. I’m not any kind of physicist or anything like that, but I tested some gotchas and the results seem to be reasonable (in a What If kind of way of thinking - the numbers should be correct in order of magnitude).

    Only ~8% of asteroids falling on the Earth are metallic.

    You can get the size of the original asteroid from the size of crater (mass of the moon and the nature of regolith are known). The biggest variables are speed of the asteroid and angle of impact (I took a reasonable guess and assumed they are not changing in these scenarios). Whether the original asteroid was mettalic or not we may never know.


  • It depends on the material.

    If the same asteroid that created the 225m wide crater on moon hit earth instead it would burn up in earth atmosphere if it was rocky in nature (~3.6m wide, 73 tons).

    If the crater was made by a mostly iron asteroid, it would create a 12.5m crater on earth (~2.3m wide, 51 tons).

    The reason for this is that rocky asteroids shatter thus have bigger surface area to burn up.

    Iron asteroids stay solid and survive the atmosphere much easily.