this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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[โ€“] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

A 12.5m crater doesn't sound that big. Sounds like what you get from a bomb in a war zone. Bad if you happen to be right next to it, but If you're a few blocks away you might have shattered windows, but no structural damage.

Where did you get the numbers btw? I took a quick look and couldn't find any details on how big the asteroid was.

[โ€“] westo232@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

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.