Sandia's teraflops computer is a joint development of DOE, Sandia, and Intel. Lockheed Martin Corp. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has research and development programs contributing to national defense, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness. The comet and 300 to 500 cubic kilometers of ocean water would be vaporized nearly instantaneously by the tremendous energy of the impact. The impact energy of about 300 gigatons of TNT would be equivalent to about 10 times the explosive power of all the nuclear weapons in existence in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The viewpoint is from orbital altitude from a location about 100 kilometers west of New York City looking east.
Long Island trails off in the distance.
Manhattan and Staten Islands are in the foreground. Eleven seconds after impact, Long Island and the New York shoreline are engulfed in debris and superheated steam, and much of the material in the upper portions of the impact plume is on suborbital trajectories.