Today, astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world collectively marvel at our mercury presence in the universe, especially as it drifts amidst large asteroids like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
June 30 marks Asteroid Day, an annual holiday to reflect on the possibility of a planet-destroying space rock hitting Earth and what scientists are doing to reduce that risk.
This day is celebrated on the anniversary of 1908 Tunguska event In Russia, the largest asteroid impact ever witnessed on Earth occurred when a space rock about half the size of a football field shattered in midair over a remote forest in Siberia. In a flash brighter than the sun, followed by a thunderous roar, the fireball killed herds of reindeer, knocked people off their porches 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the impact, and leveled an estimated 80 million trees. The impact sent so much dust into the air that sunsets were red as flames for days, and people as far away as Asia could read newspapers outdoors until midnight.
More recently, in February 2013, a 20-metre (66-foot) space rock hit Earth near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring about 1,500 people and breaking more than 3,000 windows in apartment buildings and commercial buildings. Scientists say the shock wave from the impact was strong enough to circle the planet twice.
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Although such destructive space rocks land in the oceans more often than on land, the asteroid strike of 2013 just a decade ago “reminded us that these kinds of things can happen,” Nick Moskovitz of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona told Space.com. “Asteroids have a strange duality in that they’re likely to ingredients for life “But at the same time, the wrong blow in the right place can cause serious damage to everyone around.”
Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign spearheaded by the Asteroid Foundation in Luxembourg and has been an official day on the United Nations calendar since December 2016. In previous years, this day was celebrated with dozens of local events in surrounding institutions. Conversations around asteroid science were topical that year.
For example, last year many events Focused on NASA’s insane success DART missionA refrigerator-sized spacecraft was likely to crash into an asteroid called Dimorphos, knocking the space rock out of orbit by 33 minutes. change the shape of an object additionally. DART was humanity’s first planetary defense test and proved that scientists had the technology necessary to defend Earth should a similar space rock be on a collision course with our planet. “Last year Asteroid Day was very similar to the DART festival,” Moskovitz said. “A joyful day.”
This year, the celebration, which took place at about 30 institutions around the world, including in India, Africa, Europe and Mexico, included talks about the European Hera mission, a follow-up to DART, which is scheduled to launch in October and is designed to assess the aftermath of the mission. In Luxembourg, where the Asteroid Foundation is based, events on Friday and Saturday (June 28 and 29) ranged from seminars on asteroid science and space sustainability to workshops where visitors could build spaceships with Legos. At night, participants explored the night sky in real time by virtually controlling telescopes in Tuscany, Italy, under the guidance of astronomer Gianluca Masi, who directs the Virtual Telescope Project.
Here is a map outlines the locations of similar ongoing events around the world. If there are none nearby, you can listen to the foundation’s online discussions about asteroids by astronauts and industry experts recently published.
Hundreds of people in the United States are expected to join scientists on full-scale tours of Meteor Crater today (June 30). The tours are planned to include asteroid science demonstrations, themed games, and food and drinks.
“Right here in northern Arizona, we can see the real impact asteroids are having on our planet,” said Matt Kent, president and CEO of Meteor Crater and Barringer Space Museum. previous announcement“What better place to hold an Asteroid Day event than here?”
By 7 p.m. local time, visitors will head to the Lowell Observatory, about a half-hour drive away, for telescope observations and scientific presentations given by astronomers including Moskovitz. Because Asteroid Day fell on a weekend this year, “we could see pretty large crowds between the two areas,” he said.
Lowell research scientist Brian Skiff will discuss Venus’ strange half-moon. The space rock, which is also considered a near-Earth asteroid, was discovered in 2002 and recently received this stylish name. zoozve. It appears to orbit Venus but is not permanently attached to the planet’s gravitational tides, meaning it will eventually get kicked around. It is considered a potentially dangerous space rock but is not on a collision course with Earth.
Also in Lowell, Moskovitz will present a project that uses off-the-shelf security cameras to take pictures of the night sky, cataloging up to 500 meteors each night. The project, called LO-CAMS (short for Lowell Observatory Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance), is “all about using the right equipment for good scientific purposes,” he said. “The night sky can be very active if you have the right monitoring tools.”
The project began eight years ago as a hobby project by Moskovitz and has since grown into a full-fledged operation that has placed dozens of cameras on the rooftops of science institutions, schools, colleges, and occasionally even private residences across Arizona. Moskovitz and the LO-CAMS team can predict the paths of pea-sized meteors from the HD-resolution photos captured by these cameras and then look for pieces that may have survived their journey to the ground, “like an ultimate scavenger hunt.” Moskovitz.
In an interesting cosmic coincidence, this year’s Asteroid Day comes on the heels of two asteroids passing by Earth. To be clear, neither was on a path to impact our planet, but the meeting was notable nonetheless. The larger of the pair, a Mount Everest-sized space rock named 415029 (2011 UL21), hurtled past our planet on Thursday, June 27, flying about 17 times farther from Earth than the Moon is on average. However, the smaller asteroid, designated 2024 MK, entered Earth’s orbit around the Moon on Saturday, June 29, moving close enough to be visible to stargazers using small telescopes in dark-sky locations.
If an asteroid were to be on a collision course with Earth, asteroid deflection missions like DART would be crucial to reducing the risk of an impact. The mission, universally viewed as a success on many levels, is a testament to our current technology and the team of hundreds of scientists and engineers who developed it. But the effectiveness of any strategy depends on the size of the space rock and how much lead time is available. The only way to reduce the risk of an immediate asteroid impact is to find and track as many asteroids as possible, because the ones that pose a risk to Earth “are typically objects that are being discovered now that are likely to have potential impacts decades or centuries away,” Moskovitz says.
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— Zoozve, the strange ‘moon’ of Venus that got its name by chance
Technological advances in recent years have allowed scientists to catalog a growing number of asteroids in our solar system, including artificial intelligence software that has previously revealed more than 27,000 asteroids. overlooked in telescope imagesAt least a few million more space rocks are expected to be discovered during upcoming space exploration. Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryIt will image the southern sky every night for at least a decade, starting next year. At such a pace, the observatory is expected to double the number of known asteroids in just its first six months of operation.
Within the next few decades, scientists may be able to mitigate — if not largely eliminate — the risk associated with large asteroid impacts, Moskovitz said.
“That’s a luxury that dinosaurs didn’t have, and it’s something that will benefit us forever as we move forward as a species.”