Dr. Brian May of Queen, astrophysicist and legendary musician, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grig Richters, and B612 Foundation President Danica Remy co-founded Asteroid Day. Additionally, 30th of June is designated as Asteroid Day to commemorate the Siberian Tunguska catastrophe, which was the greatest asteroid impact in recorded history.
Their mission is to raise public awareness about asteroids’ significance, including their role in the formation of our solar system, their impact on space resources, and the need to protect our planet from prospective impacts.
The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) is working for many years recognising the impact and hazard of an asteroid strike. The plan is to:
- identify those objects that pose a threat of impact
- plan a corresponding mitigation campaign,
- cooperative action in the interest of public safety on the part of the global community
Check out this month’s #PlanetaryDefense by the numbers video to learn more about @NASA‘s ongoing efforts to find, characterize, and track near-Earth #asteroids! pic.twitter.com/v6OQhb18RE
— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) June 1, 2021
The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) uses well-defined communication plans and protocols to assist Governments in the analysis of possible consequences of an asteroid impact and to support the planning of mitigation responses.
Previous Close Approaches
On 15 February 2013, a large fireball (technically, called a “superbolide”), travelling at a velocity of 18.6 kilometers per second, entered the atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk. According to NASA, the approximate effective diameter of the asteroid was estimated at 18 meters and its mass at 11,000 tons.
The approximate total impact energy of the Chelyabinsk Fireball, in kilotons of TNT explosives (the energy parameter usually quoted for a fireball), was 440 kilotons.
The Chelyabinsk event was an extraordinarily large fireball, the most energetic impact event recognized since the 1908 Tunguska blast in Russian Siberia.