Doubling an asteroid's speed quadruples its impact energy
When a space rock hurtles toward Earth, its speed matters far more than its size because kinetic energy grows exponentially with every extra mile per hour.
When a cosmic rock the size of a small apartment building streaks through the atmosphere, its destructive power is hidden in its velocity rather than its weight. Because kinetic energy is calculated by squaring the speed, an asteroid traveling at thirty miles per second carries four times the punch of one moving at fifteen. This physics meant that the 2013 meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia, arrived with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT. Even though it exploded twenty miles above the ground, the resulting pressure wave was intense enough to shatter windows across six different cities.