Zagreb and Rab are hosting informative and educational events on June 30 to celebrate Asteroid Day, a global day of education to help protect Earth from asteroids
Nikola Tesla Technical Museum and ProGEO association for the conservation of the geological heritage are organising a special programme to mark Asteroid Day on June 30. All events taking place at the Museum 5 p.m. – 9 p.m. are free.
“My Asteroid” workshop will give the youngest visitors a chance to find out more about asteroids and build their own model made from paper, potatoes, or modelling materials. There will also be a workshop which includes learning about craters on Mars and the Moon, and one about how different coloured meteors are made and how fast spaceships are.
A 2015 film called 51 Degrees North will be screened at the museum, as well as a series of asteroid-themed short films.
Find out more about the event here.
Asteroid Day – history
In February 2014, Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and famed guitarist for the rock band QUEEN, began working with Grigorij Richters, the director of a new film titled 51 Degrees North, a fictional story of an asteroid impact on London and the resulting human condition. May composed the music for the film and suggested that Richters preview it at Starmus, an event organised by Dr. Garik Israelian and attended by esteemed astrophysicists, scientists and artists, including Dr. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Rick Wakeman. The result was the beginning of discussions that would lead to the launch of Asteroid Day in 2015.
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 realisation 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.”
Find out more about Asteroid Day here.
Asteroid Day is also a chance to commemorate the last known and largest impact event on Earth in recorded history – the Tunguska event. The explosion flattened 2,000 km2 of uninhabited forest in Siberia on June 30, 1908. Even though the comet was relatively small (60-90 m), the energy air burst it caused was 10-15 megatons, which represents an energy about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Trees knocked over by the blast, Wikimedia commons
