One early summer morning, I meet up with geologist Peter Schultz at a gun range. This isn’t your typical gun range—it’s a high-tech laboratory run by the NASA Ames Research Center out in California.

[Listen to the radio segment about this story.]

There aren’t any pistols or paper targets. Instead, in the middle of the room is a bright orange, two-story metal tube—a gigantic gun. When I arrive, Peter and his crew are cranking it into position.

Peter explains how the gun works. First it’s loaded with smokeless gunpowder. Lighting the gunpowder causes a plastic slug to tamp down on the barrel of the gun, pressurizing hydrogen gas that’s stored inside. That gas can reach up to a million times atmospheric pressure, and once it’s released, it expands quite rapidly. When the trigger is pulled, the gas careens down a tapered cylinder, launching a projectile at a maximum speed of 15,000 miles per hour.

“This sounds like a bad idea,” I laugh.

Peter’s using the gun to simulate impacts from space rocks like asteroids and meteorites.

[These facts about asteroids rock.]

“My background is in both astronomy and geology,” explains Peter, who's a professor emeritus of geological sciences at Brown University. “So there was another part of me that was interested in the objects flying around in space."

Imagine a meteorite slamming into the earth. The energy from the impact creates a curtain of dust and debris, plus an incredible amount of heat—thousands of degrees that melt soil, rock, and anything else nearby.