Computer simulation with FEM is very useful to analyze hypervelocity impact phenomena that are tremendously expensive or otherwise too impractical to analyze experimentally. Shock physics can be efficiently handled by mesh adaptation which allows finite element mesh to be locally optimized to resolve moving shock wave in explosion. In this paper, an adaptive meshing technique based upon quadtree data structure was applied to resolve ballistic impact phenomena. The technique can adaptively refine a mesh in the neighborhood of a shock and coarsen the mesh for the smooth flow behind the shock according to a criterion. The criterion for refinement and coarsening is based upon the standard deviation of the gradient of shock pressure on the associated field. Shock simulation starts with the rough mesh of the pressure field and mesh density is increased locally under the criterion at each time step. The results show that the mesh adaptation enables to minimize the global computation error of FEM and to increase storage and computational saving compared to the fixed resolution of the conventional static mesh approach.