Wednesday, 3 February 2016

Building a custom calculator to calculate the sizes of impact craters

I'm a planetary scientist, and one of my specialties is studying how impact craters (like the one that killed the dinosaurs). I'm interested in building an online calculator where the inputs would be (with a few more options):

  • impact velocity and angle
  • projectile size
  • target body gravity (i.e. moon, earth, mars...)
  • target body composition.

and output the size of the impact crater that should be produced. I'd also like to include the inverse (where you input crater size and back out the size of the projectile required).

If possible i'd like to build this with an option for pull down menus to populate fields (i.e. earth's gravity = 9.8 m/s), while also allowing for custom numbers.

The ability to produce an include a graph would also be really cool.

There used to be an online tool with these capabilities, and it was widely used by scientists. However, there were some issues with the underlying equations, and it was taken down.

I'm pretty experienced with scientific programming in fortran, python, matlab, and mathematica, but I have absolutely no experience with web development.

Any suggestions on where to look to get a project like this started? Any language suggestions? Alternately, is this a difficult enough task that I should be considering paying someone to do the work?



Epic visual tool

Epson 5030UB 2D/3D 1080p 3LCD Projector Submitted February 03, 2016 at 08:40PM by GPSBach http://ift.tt/1PSC7Ru

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