Asteroid Day 2018 – UC Riverside

Asteroid Day 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 organized large and small events are held on Asteroid Day, and range from lectures and other educational programs to live concerts and broader community events, to raise public awareness of the need for increased detection and tracking of asteroids.

Asteroid day is supported by scientists, astronauts, artists and leaders worldwide, including  Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, Prof. Richard Dawkins, and Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Dr. Brian May.

ACTIVITIES AT UC RIVERSIDE
#ucrasteroid

• Friday, June 29, 2018
• Location: Room #3035 in the Physics Building at UC Riverside
• Suggested parking: lot 10 ($6 for 2 hours)

“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.