This year’s Asteroid Day has events planned, including one at the Skyland Lodge Conference Center in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park at 9 p.m. on Sunday.
June 30, 2015 was the first “Asteroid Day” — “a global awareness movement where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet” from collisions with asteroids and comets.
Events are planned for this year’s Asteroid Day, held 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 30 at 9 p.m. . east.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created an excellent Asteroid Day resource page full of “teaching moments, student activities, and educator guides about asteroids and comets.”
A significant date in Earth’s history
On this date in 1908, “a rocky (not icy) body between 164 and 262 feet in diameter entered the atmosphere at about 34,000 miles per hour, producing an explosion of 10 to 30 megatons, equivalent to the energy of the 1980 explosion of Mt. St. Helens eruption 6 to 9 miles high” occurred over Tunguska, Russia, according to a 2019 NASA update on the “Tungus Event.”
The Tunguska event devastated 830 square miles and leveled 80 million trees in the largest such event in modern times. That’s why Asteroid Day is held every year on June 30, as a reminder to the world that planetary defenses against asteroids and comets matter.
We had the Chelyabinsk impact in 2013 which was historic due to the number of injuries and building damage it caused – the most ever recorded by an asteroid/meteorite 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 meticulous recovery process of the associated meteorites.
Chelyabinsk also improved our knowledge of the threat posed by asteroids that are smaller than a kilometer. Smaller asteroids like Chelyabinsk pose a greater danger of damage than previously thought.
In December 2018, an event with 40% of the energy release from Chelyabinsk occurred over the Bering Sea, again confirming 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 improved detection of the millions of asteroids.
The DC area’s direct connection to Asteroid Day
The B612 Foundation announced Friday that a local researcher has 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, PhD in Astronomy. student at the University of Maryland for his outstanding proposal for a Saturday twilight viewing campaign. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart presented the prestigious award at a special ceremony featuring NASA astronauts Steve Smith and Nicole Stott, as well as YouTuber Scott Manley.
Below are important highlights in planetary defense that have greatly improved or will improve our defenses against an approaching asteroid through detection and deflection:
- NASA created the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
- Interagency exercises such as the “fifth biennial interagency planetary defense tabletop exercise” held in Maryland are regularly held to test real-world scenarios and responses.
- In 2021, we finally got approval for a space-based telescope mission, the NEO Surveyor, which is designed specifically to find space rocks large and small – like Chelyabinsk. This mission will greatly improve our ability to detect space rocks, especially those that lurk 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 spacecraft bus starting this fall in preparation for a September 2028 launch.”
- NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection (DART) mission impacted and changed the orbit of an asteroid in September 2022.
- A worldwide community of citizen astronomers, together with the SETI Institute, are actively involved in protecting the planet 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 are dead because they didn’t have telescopes or a space program.” I use this phrase of mine to emphasize to my audience what we must do to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs that were killed by an impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago.
The cosmic clock is ticking. Asteroid Day became part of the movement.
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