Today marks the first Asteroid Day, a day dedicated to raising public awareness about the potential danger posed by asteroids and any space object whose trajectory passes through the Earth’s orbit. The date was chosen because it’s the anniversary of the Tunguska event, the destruction of a large area of Siberia that took place on June 30, 1908 due to the impact of a meteorite or a piece of comet.
The idea of the Asteroid Day was launched by the German director Grigorij Richters who, after seeing a documentary about asteroids, made a film on the subject. Contacts with various scientists finally led to the Asteroid Day. A series of events are planned around the world and you can find information about them on the website that follows the event.
The main events will be held in London and San Francisco. In the Californian city Grigorij Richters will present but also the famous musician Brian May, who is also an astrophysicist and is a supporter of the Asteroid Day. Among the speakers, there will also be the astronaut Ed Lu, one of the founders of the B612 Foundation, which has been dealing for years with the problem of the potential asteroid threat. In 2013 Ed Lu spoke to the UN in a meeting that aimed to discuss exactly about ways to defend the Earth from the impact of an asteroid.
Among the initiatives of the Asteroid Day reported on the event website there’s the 100x Declaration. It’s a petition calling for accelerating a hundred-fold the detection and tracking of the so-called NEOs (Near Earth Objects), objects whose orbits pass close to Earth. There are already various initiatives by NASA and ESA but it’s estimated that there might be a million NEOs while we know only about 10,000 of them.
I confess that I’m skeptical about petitions in general, especially online ones because it’s easy to enter your data and click on the button that register them and then forget about it. I think it’s much more meaningful to dovote time to initiatives such as the Asteroid Day or make a donation to active groups such as the B612 Foundation.
The interest in these initiatives is limited because this type of threat isn’t considered important. With the instruments built in recent decades, it was possible to verify that asteroids often pass close to Earth. Impacts from meteorites occur all the time: in many cases, no one notices but on February 15, 2013 one, not even great, exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing serious damage. If we do nothing it’s only a matter of time before such an event causes victims and if it’s an asteroid of a certain size the catastrophe would be global.
[ad name=”eBayUSUKAstronomy”]
