“Asteroid Day,” might not be well-known throughout the country, but it is celebrated annually in New Mexico. This year was no different as the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque featured a show in the planetarium during the June 30 festivities. The show “Incoming,” according to a KRQE report, “explores the past, present, and future of the planet through a look at asteroid and comet collisions” with a special focus on the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor.
The museum also featured a live broadcast of Asteroid Day events being held around the world. Some activities taught the public about meteors.
“We do know that asteroids and comets do impact the Earth from time to time,” Jim Greenhouse, the space science director at the history museum told KRQE. “Fortunately there haven’t been any huge impacts in the last few million years to affect the course of human civilization. But, you know, a new asteroid or comet could impact the earth at any time. So NASA is actually launching several missions to find out more about asteroids and comets. Some of those missions will be featured in some of the content that we display on table activities that are happening on Asteroid Day.”
In 2016, the United Nations marked June 30 as International Asteroid Day. It coincides with the largest asteroid impact in recorded history, the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia. Greenhouse defined asteroids and comets as “objects that are smaller than planets or moons that are in orbit around the sun,” and are made out of rock or metal. “The vast majority of them are actually made out of rock,” he said. “Comets are made mostly out of ice. They’re kind of like dirty snowballs. And meteorites are asteroids that make it to the Earth.
Researchers, including those at the University of New Mexico, continually study asteroids and meteors to learn more about how the solar system was formed. “We look at the meteorites as remnants of asteroids that were planetary building blocks that have been preserved to the present day,” Horton Newsom, a researcher at UNM, told KRQE. “So we’re getting samples of what the materials that made up the solar system were when it first formed.”
