Asteroid Day

Asteroid Day is an event which is held on the anniversary of the Siberian Tunguska event, that
took place on June 30 1908 which is considered to be the most harmful known asteroid event
observed by Mankind; This day is celebrated to engage and educate about the asteroids.
Our universe was created nearly 14 billion years ago, creating galaxies, nearly 4.6 billion year
ago out solar system was formed, and the left-over debris that made the sun and planets like
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and etc. Are now known as Asteroids. Asteroids are celestial bodies with
no exact movement that drift around and in our solar system. There is a belt of asteroid known
as the asteroid belt between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter, as this some of the asteroids have
made it close to Earth’s orbit called as “Near Earth Asteroids/Objects”, but some of them
occasionally come dangerously close to Earth and even crash on the surface of Earth leaving
craters, similar to this nearly 66 million years ago an asteroid with an approximate diameter of
10 kilometers called Chicxulub hit the Earth surface and brought a calamitous end to the reign
of dinosaurs. As a recent news on February 15, 2013 in a remote Russian city of Chelyabinsk, a
small asteroid fell roughly 17 meters in diameter and exploded approximately 97,000 Feet in the
air which was 20 to 30 times more powerful than a nuclear bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. It's
hard to imagine if a 17-meter asteroid that didn’t hit the surface caused this amount of
destruction then what can a bigger asteroid do? As the topic to track asteroids it is a very hard
task to do as the asteroid doesn’t have a certain path and because they are rough and dark,
they are even harder to track, to track an asteroid you need data of it for years and years but
even with that data we can't predict the way of the asteroid as like the gravity of the Earth even
other planets are pulling the asteroids with their gravity which can change the orbit of the
asteroid significantly, so there is a thing called dynamical chaos that says after a certain amount
of time you will not know where the asteroid is going as gravity from all planets is pulling the
asteroid, and this means that we can't predict the asteroid movement for more than 100 years in
the future. And even if we tracked an asteroid coming towards Earth, we don’t have a fully
certain way to stop it or change its direction. After an asteroid has hit it creates a massive
shockwave destroys everything in a large radius. Many people often believe that after the
impact of the asteroid the projectile would be discoverable in that area, Same as a mining
engineer Daniel Barringer who spent 27 years mining a meteorite crater in Arizona that was 50
meters in diameter and released the energy equivalent of 10 megatons of TNT (Trinitrotoluene)
for the metallic core, but what actually happens to the projectile after impact is it explodes
because it come in towards the surface in maybe 30 to 40 kilometers per second and the kinetic
energy of it is big enough to vaporize the projectile / meteorite / asteroid turning it into a gas
which is super-hot and super high pressure that it explodes and blows out a crater, so the
projectile / meteorite / asteroid doesn’t exist after impact. So, what are the chances of Earth
being hit by an asteroid like Chicxulub or even bigger, the probability of this happening in one
year is one in a hundred million as a 10-kilometer impactor or bigger happens every hundred
million years, but we know that no 10 kilometer or bigger impactors are in the path of
intersecting Earth as they are bigger and easier to track. So surprisingly we are safe from big
impactors such as Chicxulub.

Thank you.