Eyes were looking up at Asteroid 2012 DA14’s fly-by approach on February 15, but the surprise explosion over Chelyabinsk captured the world’s attention. 

As Asteroid 2012 DA14 made its approach towards Earth on February 13-15, 2013, ultimately passing just 17,000 miles from our planet (that’s less than the distance from New York to Sydney and back) yet on February 15, 2013 a different asteroid (about 20m or 66ft) exploded just above the atmosphere near Chelyabinsk, Russia. That explosion generated an extremely bright flash and a large shock wave, resulting in a blast of energy somewhere around 30 times as much energy as that released from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. It caught the world by surprise! 

This event reminded humanity  that even in our modern society, our future is affected by the motion of astronomical bodies. The ancients were correct in their belief that the heavens affect life on Earth—just not in the way they imagined. Sometimes those heavenly bodies actually run into Earth. That is why we must make it our mission to find asteroids before they find us. 

Just two days before this explosion over Chelyabinsk, Dr. Ed Lu and Lord Martin Rees penned and published an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal outlining the importance of protecting the Earth from asteroids. The publication of the Op-Ed was scheduled weeks before and offers a proof point that we are playing  a game of cosmic roulette. Our biggest challenge today is asteroid discovery.

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