Asteroid Day

There’s always something new in the sky – and sometime it’s right over our heads. Occasionally, we even get to see some of our new visitors, in the form of meteors, those fascinating streaks that leave us sky worshipers breathless and waiting for another.

And, then, there are the not-so-tiny ones that come to Earth and make a statement. Although many of these meteorites are relatively small, and we probably are walking among them, not realizing they aren’t native to Earth, some of these can upset our peaceful ground. Witness, for example, Meteor, or Barringer, Crater, the best known and most preserved of our known impacts. Located in our Southwest, this giant hole was made by a rather large falling object thousands of years ago. Its beauty and continuity lies in the fact that it wasn’t made here, in Southern New England, where hurricanes, snow, and all-around unpredictable weather, in addition to being the starting point for many of our European descendants, would have caused the ground to have changed drastically over the centuries.

Just several years ago, the world was treated to one of the most impressive sights ever to be observed by automobile dash cams. A huge rock fell in Russia, reminding us that the sky can be very dramatic when it wanted to be. Fortunately, no humans were seriously injured, although the major cause of injury was glass, which was blasted out of windows that onlookers were a little too near.

Also, looking back just a few decades, Russia had been previously damaged, when “something” occurred in the fortunately out-of-the-way region of Tungusta, in Siberia. A shock wave was heard around the world, but, luckily, except for minor injuries, no one suffered major injuries. One of the sadder parts to this was that the country was undergoing major political change at that time, allowing no scientific expeditions to venture into the region for nearly two decades. What was discovered then was the remnants of some form of intrusion by some body that decided to come too close to the Earth.

The possibility of similar happenings such as this isn’t that far-fetched. Much like the recent event in Chelyabinsk, we really have no warning as to whether a strike such as this can ever come again. To remind us of this, the astronomy community has now declared the anniversary of the Tunguska event, June 30th, to become Asteroid Day, a reminder that we are not alone, and sometimes an occasional space object may want to come and visit. Yes, this is being mentioned a little late for us to do anything about it this year, but, as next month we will be observing one of the year’s better periodic meteor showers, and we are now aware that astronomers do want us to remember how easily it is for a fairly large object to penetrate our atmosphere and create havoc here, we might want to, not only look ahead to next June, but also remind us to keep looking up. We never know what might be up there, waiting for us.