Rocks, Shocks and Asteroids, and Some Interesting Research Directions in Mechanics

Mechanics lies at the heart of many of the underpinnings of modern technological civilization: materials, infrastructure, transportation, health and security. The mechanics of dynamic failure processes also has a major bearing on the potential catastrophes that threaten civilization, including airbursts and major asteroid impacts. Recent events (such as the Chelyabinsk meteoroid) have demonstrated the need to understand major impact and fragmentation events. Many of the fundamental problems of current interest in national security also involve impact and fragmentation, typically studied through large-scale computational simulations. In the Murray lecture, these issues were addressed by describing fundamental high-strain-rate experiments, high-speed visualization, theoretical and computational modeling of failure processes, and simulations of asteroid damage and disruption. This paper focuses on experimental results on meteorites and a basalt.