by Today, astronomers and space enthusiasts all over the world are wondering together about our mercurial presence in the universe, especially as we walk among large asteroids like the one that wiped out the 66 million dinosaurs a year ago.
June 30 Asteroid Day, a holiday observed every year to reflect on the prospect of a planet destroying a space rock on Earth and what scientists are doing to mitigate that risk.
The day is observed on the 1908 anniversary The Tunguska event in Russia, when a space rock about half the size of a football field broke up in the air over a remote forest in Siberia – the largest asteroid strike ever seen on Earth. With a flash brighter than the sun, followed by a thunder-like noise, the fireball killed herds of reindeer, knocked people more than 40 miles (64 kilometers) away from their porches and leveled about 80 a million trees. The impact dumped so much dust into the air that sunsets were fiery red for days, and people who lived as far away as Asia could read newspapers outside until midnight.
Later, in February 2013, a 20-meter (66-foot) space rock hit Earth near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring about 1,500 people and breaking over 3,000 windows in apartments and commercial buildings. The shock wave generated by the impact was so strong that it circled our planet twice, scientists say.
Related: Phosphorus in NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample suggests Bennu space rock came from ocean world
Although such terrifying space rocks land in the oceans more often than they do on land, the 2013 asteroid strike, just a decade ago, “reminded us that these things happen,” said Nick Moskovitz of the Lowell Observatory. in Arizona with Space.com. “Asteroids have this strange duality to them in that they probably delivered the ingredients for life for the Earth, but at the same time the wrong impact in the right place could cause significant damage to whoever might be around.”
Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign led by the Asteroid Foundation in Luxembourg, and has been an official day in the United Nations calendar since December 2016. In previous years, the day has been celebrated by many local events in institutions around around the world, with talks focused on asteroid science that was topical that year.
Last year, for example, many events focused on NASA’s wild success DART missionwho smashed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos and ejected the space rock from its orbit in probably 33 minutes changing the shape of the object too. DART was humanity’s first planetary defense test, and proved that scientists had the technology necessary to protect Earth if a similar space rock were ever on a collision course with our planet. “Last year, Asteroid Day was a lot like a DART fest,” Moskovitz said. “It’s a fun day.”
This year’s celebrations, which will take place in around 30 institutions around the world, including those in India, Africa, Europe and Mexico, include talks about Europe’s Hera mission, which is a follow-up to DART to be launched in October designed to assess the impact of the DART. the mission. On Friday and Saturday (June 28 and 29) in Luxembourg, where the Asteroid Foundation is based, events ranged from seminars on asteroid science and space sustainability to workshops where visitors could build spacecraft with Legos. At night, attendees explored the night sky in real time by virtually controlling a telescope in Tuscany, Italy, under the guidance of astronomer Gianluca Masi, who manages the Virtual Telescope Project.
Here you go map describing locations of similar ongoing events around the world. If none of them are nearby, you can enjoy online discussions about asteroids with astronauts and industry experts behind it recently aired.
In the United States, hundreds of people are expected to join scientists today (June 30) for full-on tours of the Meteor Crater, where asteroid science exhibits and themed games are planned along with food and drinks.
“Right here in northern Arizona, we can see the literal impact of asteroids on our planet,” said Matt Kent, president and CEO of the Barringer Meteor Crater and Space Museum, in a previous notice. “What better place to hold an Asteroid Day event than here?”
By 7:00 pm local time, visitors will begin heading to the Lowell Observatory, which is about half an hour away, for telescope viewing and science presentations given by astronomers, including Moskovitz. Because Asteroid Day falls on a weekend this year, “we could see quite large crowds between the two sites,” he said.
At Lowell, research scientist Brian Skiff will discuss the odd moon of Venus. Also considered a near-Earth asteroid, the space rock was discovered in 2002 and recently received the name snappy Zoozve. It appears to be circling Venus but is not permanently tied to the planet’s gravitational tides, meaning it will eventually begin to spin. It is considered a potentially hazardous space rock, but is not on a collision course with Earth.
Also at Lowell, Moskovitz will present a project that uses off-the-shelf security cameras to take pictures of the night sky in search of meteors, managing to catalog up to 500 each night. The project, called LO-CAMS (short for Lowell Observatory Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Monitoring), “is about cheap hardware for good scientific use,” he said. “The night sky can be very active if you have the right instruments to observe.”
The project started as a hobby project for Moskovitz eight years ago and has since grown into a full-blown operation with dozens of cameras on the roofs of science institutions, schools, colleges and, sometimes, even private residences across Arizona. From the HD-resolution photos captured by these cameras, Moskovitz and the LO-CAMS team can predict the paths of pea-sized meteors and later search for fragments that may have survived their journey to the land, “like the ultimate scavenger hunt,” said Moscow.
In an interesting Cosmic coincidence, this year’s Asteroid Day comes on the heels of two asteroids that have passed by Earth. Neither was on a path to impact our planet, to be clear, but the rendezvous was significant nonetheless. The larger of the pair, a Mount Everest-sized space rock named 415029 (2011 UL21), whizzed past our planet on Thursday (June 27), flying about 17 times further from Earth than the moon sits. , on average. However, the smaller asteroid, known as 2024 MK, wound up within the moon’s orbit of Earth on Saturday (June 29), close enough to be seen by stargazers using small telescopes in dark-sky locations.
If an asteroid were ever to be on a collision course with Earth, asteroid missions like DART would be critical to mitigating the impact risk. The mission, considered a success on many levels, is a testament to our current technology and the team of over a hundred scientists and engineers who developed it. The effectiveness of any strategy, however, really comes down to the size of the space rock and the amount of lead time we get. The only way to reduce the risk of a sudden asteroid strike is to find and track as many asteroids as we can, because the ones that pose a threat to Earth are “usually things that are found now with potential impacts decades into the future,” said Moskovitz.
Related Stories:
— A ‘God of Destruction’ asteroid will hit Earth in 2029 — and could accommodate a tiny spacecraft
— The James Webb Space Telescope shows an asteroid collision in a neighboring star system
— Zoozve, the strange ‘moon’ of Venus which earned its name by accident
Technological advances in recent years have enabled scientists to catalog a growing number of asteroids in our solar system, including artificial intelligence software that previously revealed more than 27,000 asteroids. overlook in telescope images. At least a few million space rocks are expected to be discovered in the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which, starting next year, will be an image of the southern sky every night for at least ten years. At such a time, the observatory is expected to double the number of known asteroids in the first six months of its operations.
Within the next few years, scientists may be able to mitigate the risk of large asteroid impacts — if not eliminate it largely, Moskovitz said.
“That’s a luxury that the dinosaurs didn’t have, and it’s something that will benefit us forever as we move forward as a species.”
