This post is written by B612 Co-founder, Rusty Schweickart. Rusty is an American aeronautical engineer, and a former NASA astronaut, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as well as a retired business executive and co-founder of B612 Foundation. October 7 marked 15 years since B612 was formed to protect the...
Today marks the four-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk asteroid airburst. You probably recall watching the dash cam video footage of the fireball exploding over the city, which took everyone by surprise. This particular asteroid was only 17-20 meters in diameter, or about 55-65 feet. For comparison,...
Today marks the three-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk asteroid airburst. You probably recall watching the dash cam video footage of the fireball exploding over the city. The asteroid was only 17-20 meters in diameter. For reference, the asteroid that flattened 2,000 sq km of forest...
Despite its capacity for serious harm, asteroid impact is not the largest existential threat we face right now. Climate change, resource limits, pandemics, nuclear war, societal breakdown, earthquakes and tsunamis are even more alarming. What distinguishes the asteroid threat is that mitigation is seemingly straightforward,...
The aim of Asteroid Day is to inform the public and raise awareness about the possibility that asteroids can collide with the Earth in the future. Today was chosen to highlight the risk because on the same day in 1908, a 30m object entered the...
June 30 is the 107th anniversary of the biggest asteroid strike on the Earth in recorded history. In 1908, an asteroid measuring perhaps 90-190 meters across struck Siberia, damaging over 2,000 square kilometers of Russian forest – an area that measures larger than New York’s five...
Scientists and spacefliers will be focusing attention on near-Earth objects when the first-ever Asteroid Day plays out on Tuesday — not so much to raise money, but to raise awareness about the potential threat from above and what to do about it. That last part is...
It is a cold January afternoon on the peak of Mt. Bigelow, an hour's drive north from Tucson, and the wind burns my face as I watch the colors of the desert sunset bleed into the foothills of the Catalina mountains. This is the home of...
WASHINGTON — A privately funded space telescope originally proposed to search for larger near-Earth asteroids may also be effective in detecting smaller, but more numerous and potentially more dangerous, such objects. In a presentation at the International Academy of Astronautics’ Planetary Defense Conference in Frascati, Italy,...
Humankind lives in a cosmic shooting gallery. For evidence of that, we need look no further than the events of 15 February 2013. On that day, a medium-size asteroid was set to pass some 28,000 kilometers from Earth, unusually close and well within the orbits...