Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics GPU-Acceleration Tool for Asteroid Fragmentation Simulation

Abstract

The impact threat of near-Earth objects (NEOs) is a concern to the global community, as evidenced by the Chelyabinsk event (caused by a 17-m meteorite) in Russia on February 15, 2013 and a near miss by asteroid 2012 DA14 (~30 m diameter), on the same day. The expected energy, from either a low-altitude air burst or direct impact, would have severe consequences, especially in populated regions. To mitigate this threat one of the methods is employment of large kinetic-energy impactors (KEIs). The simulation of asteroid target fragmentation is a challenging task which demands efficient and accurate numerical methods with large computational power. Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) lead to a major increase 10 times and more in the performance of the computation of astrophysical and high velocity impacts. The paper presents a new implementation of the numerical method smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) using NVIDIA-GPU and the first astrophysical and high velocity application of the new code. The code allows for a tremendous increase in speed of astrophysical simulations with SPH and self-gravity at low costs for new hardware. We have implemented the SPH equations to model gas, liquids and elastic, and plastic solid bodies and added a fragmentation model for brittle materials. Self-gravity may be optionally included in the simulations.