Jun 30, 2019
Image: Asteroid Watch app - NASA/JPL/Apple
Asteroid Day is a UN-sanctioned global awareness campaign according to asteroidday.org. This year thousands of self-organized events were hosted around the world.
More than 1M asteroids have the potential to impact Earth and through all the available telescopes worldwide, we have discovered only about one percent. The 100X Declaration calls for increasing the asteroid discovery rate to 100,000 (or 100x) per year within the next 10 years. “The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it became that the human race has been living on borrowed time,” remarked Brian May. “Asteroid Day and the 100X Declaration are ways for the public to contribute to an awareness of the Earth’s vulnerability and the realization that Asteroids hit Earth all the time.” Asteroid Day would the vehicle to garner public support to increase our knowledge of when asteroids might strike and how we can protect ourselves.”
“Early warning is the essential ingredient of planetary defense,” said Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 Astronaut, founder of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) and chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel. “Time is the issue. At the current rate of discovery of 20 meter NEOs and larger at about 1000/year, it will take more than 1,000 years to find one million NEOs that potentially threaten Earth. That’s a long time and even then we’d have reached only 10% or so of the Chelyabinsk-size objects that potentially threaten impact.
A Press Conference to announce the launch of Asteroid Day was held simultaneously in London and San Francisco on December 3, 2014. Representing Asteroid Day in London were Richters, May and Rees, and in San Francisco, Schweichart, Lu and Tom Jones, President of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE). Lord Martin Rees read the 100X Declaration and the list of signatories for the 100x Asteroid Declaration rapidly grew to include hundreds of esteemed scientists, physicists, astronauts, and Nobel Laureates from 30 countries and leaders in business and the arts. Original signers include Anousheh Ansari, Stewart Brand, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Alan Eustace, Peter Gabriel, Steve Jurvetson, Jane Luu, Dr. Brian May, Greg McAdoo, Peter Norvig, Helen Sharman, Jill Tarter, Kip Thorne and more than 38 astronauts and cosmonauts.
To date, the 100X Declaration has been signed by more than 22,000 private citizens.
What began as a scientifically-based declaration about the need for rapid discovery of asteroids to ensure the defense of our planet, grew to a global movement of awareness regarding this solvable nature-caused problem that included more than 500 self-organized events around the globe across 72 countries. Through the technological capabilities of the scientists on our planet, Asteroid Day put out the challenge to collectively obtain the data about our solar system that will allow us to have the knowledge about our near-Earth objects in order to prevent future destruction to our planet and subsequently verify efforts to deflect those asteroids away from Earth’s orbit.
The Story
Asteroid Day is a dynamic awareness and educational program to inspire the world about asteroids – their role in the formation of our universe, how we can use their resources, how asteroids can pave the way for future exploration and finally how we can protect our planet from asteroid impacts. Asteroid Day events are held on 30 June each year to mark the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska impact. Asteroid Day events are largely independently organized around the world for people of all ages and are mostly free-of-charge. Asteroid Day is a program run by the Asteroid Foundation, a Luxembourg nonprofit organization.
Asteroid Day was co-founded in 2014, by Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and lead guitarist of QUEEN, together with Danica Remy, President of B612 Foundation, Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 Astronaut, and filmmaker Grig Richters. In 2016, the United Nations officially designated Asteroid Day as the international day of awareness and education about asteroids. Together with the United Nations, space agencies, schools and universities Asteroid Day is organized by networks of supporters who host events worldwide on 30, June and any other day of the year that the independent groups determine.
To initially launch the Asteroid Day education programs in 2014, members of the asteroid community drafted and released a petition to gather public support for asteroid education and called on governments to accelerate the funding of asteroid discovery programs. Today, this petition, the 100X Asteroid Declaration, has been signed by hundreds of prominent individuals around the world, including leaders in science, technology, and business, and more than 125 astronauts.
Thanks to its partners and supporters, and particularly to the Government of Luxembourg, where the Foundation is headquartered, Asteroid Day has made significant strides educating the world about asteroids. Through our work we share information and teach about the science, opportunities, and risks of asteroids. Since the first events in 2015, the movement has grown exponentially. Through Asteroid Day, we continue to inspire people and young minds to look up into the sky and to be excited about our Solar System.
The Mission
Asteroid Day takes place annually on June 30. It is a global awareness campaign where people from around the world come together to learn about asteroids, the impact hazard they may pose, and what we can do to protect our planet, families, communities, and future generations from future asteroid impacts. Asteroid Day is held each year on the anniversary of the largest impact in recent history, the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia. A relatively small asteroid, about 40 meters across or the size of a modest office building, devastated an unpopulated area about the size of a major metropolitan city. Regionally organised large and small events are held on Asteroid Day, and range from lectures and other educational programmes to live concerts and broader community events, to raise public awareness of the need for increased detection and tracking of asteroids.
The *100x Asteroid Declaration*, calling for this action, has been signed by hundreds of astronauts, scientists, artists and leaders in business and technology as well as thousands of private citizens. Employing existing and new technology to detect and track asteroids and demonstrating deflection capabilities to prevent future asteroid impacts could be humanity’s greatest achievement. Asteroid Day could one day help save ALL the species on this planet by highlighting the work that is currently being done locally and globally in this field. Asteroid Day highlights men and women who dedicate their lives to the science and technology that will enable planetary defense. You can help by organising a local event and by signing the 100X Declaration. We’re continuing to learn about the evolution of the solar system and the role of asteroids in space and Earth’s history. Small impacts occur regularly and NASA shows that world-wide efforts to date have found about 95% of the asteroids that could end life on Earth as we know it, were one to impact. Based on what’s known about the NEO population and Earth’s impact history, scientists predict that Earth will experience another large-scale impact someday in the future – they just don’t know exactly when. Our goal is to raise public awareness about asteroid science and plans for planetary defense.
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