Blasting Rocks in Space: Asteroids, Rocky, and the Power of Fast Simulation
By: Jason Shar
I grew up playing classic, retro video games. Spinning hedgehogs, jumpsuits digging around and fighting monsters, cars racing around the track, you name it! One such game featured tiny triangular ship, a few floating rocks, and the satisfaction of blasting them into pieces! It was simple, fast, and endlessly fun. For World Space Week, I decided to pay homage to that game using Ansys Rocky. Instead of pixels on a screen, I modeled actual particles, collisions, and breakage in 3D. The result? A modern engineering twist on a retro classic.
My triangular “ship” fires a single particle at a floating space rock. Upon impact, the rock instantly fractures into dozens of smaller fragments that drifts away across the simulation domain. Just like in the game, the particles wrapped around the edges and re-entered from the opposite side, thanks to periodic boundary conditions. And here’s the surprising part: I ran the whole thing on my laptop in just a few minutes!
How Rocky Breaks Rocks
Behind the fun visual, there’s serious physics at work. Rocky natively handles particle breakage through models like Ab-T10, which treats each particle as a single breakable unit that shatters when it absorbs enough impact energy. When breakage occurs, Rocky automatically ensures the fragments conserve both mass and volume—no magic, just physics.
Unlike a video game that simply swaps one sprite for another, Rocky calculates energy transfer during collisions, determines whether a particle should fracture, and generates fragments dynamically. It even accounts for different gravitational environments, from Earth-like to low-gravity asteroid belts.
Why This Matters Beyond Games
Of course, I wasn’t just recreating a childhood memory. Particle breakage is critical in industries ranging from mining to pharmaceuticals. Understanding how materials fracture under impact allows engineers to optimize crushers, mills, or even drug tablet design. The same physics that made my asteroid explode in Rocky is used every day to predict throughput, efficiency, and wear in real equipment.
The bigger lesson? High-fidelity physics doesn’t always require a supercomputer. For early exploration, concept testing, or even educational outreach, Rocky can run fast and efficiently on a laptop. Sometimes “close enough” is more than enough to move a design forward, just as a simple video game could capture the imagination of a generation.
Final Thought
This World Space Week, while we celebrate humanity’s achievements in space exploration, it’s worth remembering how accessible simulation has become here on Earth. With tools like Ansys Rocky, anyone from a design engineer to a curious enthusiast can model the complex physics of particle breakage and dynamics—whether for serious research or for a playful nod to an old arcade classic.
So next time you see a rock floating in space—real or virtual—know that with the right simulation, you’ve got the power to break it apart, study it, and maybe even have a little fun along the way.
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