Aas 15-568 a Gpu-accelerated Computational Tool for Asteroid Disruption Modeling and Simulation

This paper presents a two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation tool for studying the effectiveness of hypervelocity kinetic-energy impactors (KEIs) and nuclear subsurface explosions for disrupting (i.e., dispersively pulverizing) hazardous asteroids. High-order methods on GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are employed for hydrodynamic simulations of such complex physical problems. Because highorder method schemes are compact (many operations per element), they are highly parallelized and are ideal for the architecture of GPUs. This paper focuses on the implementation of such numerical methods with GPUs as applied to the asteroid disruption problem. Three cases are compared for disrupting a reference 2D 100-m asteroid model of a nominal density of 2000 kg/m. They are: i) a single, 5000-kg KEI with 10-km/s impact speed, ii) five 1000-kg KEIs in parallel, and iii) a 100-kt nuclear subsurface explosion subsequent to a smaller 500-kg KEI.