This year’s Asteroid Day has events planned including one at the Skyland Lodge Conference Center in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park at 9pm on Sunday.
June 30, 2015, was the first “Asteroid Day” – a “global awareness movement where people from all over the world come together to learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet” from asteroid and comet impacts.
This year’s Asteroid Day has events planned around the world and online, including mine: “The Sky IS Falling: Space Rocks and You,” at the Skyland Lodge Conference Center in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park on Sunday, June 30th at 9pm Eastern.
An excellent Asteroid Day resource page has been created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, filled with “teaching moments, student activities and educator guides on asteroids and comets.”
An important date in Earth’s history
On this date in 1908, a “rocky (non-icy) body, between 164 and 262 meters in diameter, entered the atmosphere at about 34,000 miles per hour, depositing an explosion of 10 to 30 megatons, equivalent to the energy of The 1980 Mount St. Helena Eruption, 6 to 9 miles high, occurred over Tunguska, Russia, according to a 2019 NASA update on the Tunguska Event.
The Tunguska event destroyed 830 square miles and leveled 80 million trees in the largest such event in modern times. That’s why Asteroid Day is observed every year on June 30, as a reminder to the world that planetary defense against asteroids and comets matters.
We had the Chelyabinsk impact event in 2013 which was historic due to the number of injuries and damage to buildings it caused – the most ever recorded due to an asteroid/meteor event.
The Chelyabinsk event was the most documented asteroid explosion and meteorite fall ever, due to the number of videos, audio recordings, photographs, witness interviews, and the precise recovery process of the associated meteorites.
Chelyabinsk also improved our knowledge about the threat posed by asteroids that are smaller than one kilometer. Smaller asteroids like Chelyabinsk pose a greater risk of damage than previously thought.
In December 2018, an event with 40% of Chelyabinsk’s energy release took place over the Bering Sea, reaffirming that such events occur more often than we would like.
Efforts by the United Nations, NASA, ESA and the B612 Foundation are working to develop a defense capability as well as improve detection of millions of asteroids.
DC area direct link to Asteroid Day
The B612 Foundation announced Friday that a local researcher won the first Planetary Defense award, called the Schweickart Prize, launched in 2023 in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.
The award was presented to Joe DeMartini, a PhD in astronomy. student at the University of Maryland, for his extraordinary proposal for the Saturday twilight observation campaign. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart presented the prestigious award at a special ceremony with NASA astronauts Steve Smith and Nicole Stott, as well as YouTuber Scott Manley.
Below are the main points of planetary defense that have or will significantly improve our defense against an incoming asteroid through detection and diversion:
- NASA has established the Office of Planetary Defense Coordination.
- Interagency exercises such as the Fifth Biennial Interagency Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise held in Maryland are conducted regularly to test real-world scenarios and responses.
- In 2021, we finally got the go-ahead for a space-based telescope mission, the NEO Surveyor, which is specifically designed to find space rocks large and small – like Chelyabinsk. This mission will greatly improve our ability to detect space rocks, especially those that lie close to the Sun (like Chelyabinsk) and as a result cannot be easily seen by Earth-based telescopes. In an email, NEO Surveyor principal investigator Dr. Amy Mainzer said, “We are excited to ramp up work on the shuttle bus starting this fall in preparation for launch in September 2028.”
- NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission impacted and changed the orbit of an asteroid in September 2022.
- A worldwide community of citizen astronomers in collaboration with the SETI Institute are actively participating in planetary protection by making real-time observations using telescopes made by Unistellar. I bought one of their telescopes to participate in their citizen science projects.
One last point to consider: “Dinosaurs died out because they didn’t have telescopes or a space program.” I use this phrase of mine to highlight to my audience what we must do to avoid the path of the dinosaurs that were killed by an impact on the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago.
The cosmic clock is ticking. Asteroid Day became part of the movement.
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