30th June, Asteroid Day

Ryugu asteroid. Poster to illustrate the activities that the Solar System group of the IAC carries out on the Asteroid Day. Background image credit: JAXA.
Ryugu asteroid. Poster to illustrate the activities that the Solar System group of the IAC carries out on the Asteroid Day. Background image credit: JAXA.
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In 2016 the United Nations declared June 30th as Asteroid Day, to raise awareness about the potential risk of asteroid impacts on the Earth, and to spread knowledge about these small bodies connected with the origins of the Solar System. To celebrate this, there will be world wide outreach activities related to these objects in space.

The IAC will join in this celebration with lectures given by some of its researchers. Julia de León will be giving a lecture in the Planetarium of Castellón (Valencia) on July 6th, in which she will explain the composition of the asteroids and the space missions which are currently on the way to two of them. In particular she will talk about the NASA OSIRIS-Rex mission, of which she is a member.

Miquel Serra Ricart, via the citizen science project “Asteroid Hunters” cazasteroides.org), of which he is in charge will begin, on Friday 29th June, a contest related to Asteroid Day. The user of this application for mobile phones which wins first place in the ranking will win a metallic meteorite (found in the Sikhote Alin cráter, in Russia). Cazasteroids was initiated at the end of 2016, funded jointly by the FECYT, the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the IAC has over 3,000 users, some 70,000 detections, and 197 new asteroid candidates.

Artistic representation of the collision between two asteroids of the main belt: https://youtu.be/hyE6EbFTOAU 

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