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Lorien Wheeler

Publications and source records attributed to Lorien Wheeler.

24 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
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Consequences of Asteroid Characterization on the State of Knowledge about Inferred Physical Properties and Impact Risk

Physical characteristics of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are essential inputs to planetary defense assessments. The size, density, and strength of an NEO are critical inputs to modeling behavior during atmospheric entry as well as assessing the risk of impact. Similarly, knowledge of the physical characteristics of an object are necessary to evaluate the probable result of a mitigation mission. Usually, these attributes cannot be directly measured, but increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed to infer physical properties from related measurements of asteroids, meteors, and/or meteorites. Fortuitously, some of these measurements have been obtained for enough NEOs to elucidate the distribution of values across the sampled population. However, the situation becomes more challenging when considering a specific asteroid, since it is unlikely that all the relevant measurements have been made for any given object. We have developed a Bayesian network that can combine available information about a particular NEO with knowledge of the larger population to infer probabilistic values and uncertainties for physical characteristics of interest. Distributions of asteroid population albedos, taxonomic classes, and macroporosities, along with meteorite density distributions and associations between taxonomic classes and meteorite classes, provide the default distributions for the network’s parameter nodes. The inference network links parameters for each virtual asteroid either deterministically or probabilistically as appropriate, and eliminates any unphysical combinations of parameters. Within the context of planetary defense, our Bayesian network can be used to constrain the ranges of likely impactor properties, which can subsequently reduce the uncertainty in modelling of atmospheric entry, mitigation efficacy, and impact risk assessment. When additional measurements become available for a specific object, the network incorporates those measurements to generate virtual asteroids with property distributions that are consistent with the measurements. We will use the 2023 PDC scenario to demonstrate how the inference network can be combined with plausible characterization measurements to refine the state of knowledge about likely combinations of physical parameters and the resulting impact risk.

risk assessment↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Airburst & Blast Damage Modeling Sensitivities for Asteroid Impact Risk Assessment

Blast overpressure from a high-energy airburst or surface impact is the primary source of damage from potentially hazardous asteroid strikes. There are many sources of uncertainty in evaluating these potential damage risks, both in the approaches used to model the entry, breakup, and airburst behaviors of diverse asteroid properties, and in the blast modeling approaches used to estimate the ground damage from these very large-scale, high-energy events. In this study, we use NASA’s Probabilistic Asteroid Impact Risk (PAIR) model to investigate trends and sensitivities in asteroid airburst altitudes and the resulting blast damage estimates across a range of asteroid sizes. In particular, we show how uncertainties in asteroid breakup behavior and effective airburst altitudes combine with height-of-burst (HOB) blast damage models to produce key sensitivities and trends in the amount of damage expected from different asteroid sizes and airburst altitudes. We show airburst altitude ranges and probabilities stemming from asteroid entry and breakup modeling uncertainties, compare differences between traditional nuclear-based HOB blast models and simulation-based HOB models for larger asteroid energies, and show how the resulting interplay between likely burst altitudes and optimal burst heights affects blast damage trends across different asteroid sizes. Finally, we combine the relative likelihoods of asteroid sizes, airburst altitudes, and resulting blast damage severity to evaluate what airburst regimes pose the highest overall level of risk (when considering both the relative likelihood and scale of potential damage) for a mid-sized asteroid threat scenario. Results show what asteroid size regimes are most sensitive to airburst and blast modeling uncertainties, provide insight into nonintuitive trends in the size and severity of blast damage expected from different airburst events, and highlight where additional blast modeling studies or refinements may help improve future impact risk estimates

ATAP↗