Yesterday I received an email from The Planetary Society about Asteroid Day.
Beginning at the beginning, The Planetary Society is an organization for people interested in anything involving space — “We create. We educate. We advocate.” One of their latest activities has been to support the LightSail experiment — using the solar wind for interstellar exploration.
A main objective is scanning space for asteroids that might be a threat to Earth. Hence Asteroid Day, described as “a global awareness movement to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.” Their website (http://www.asteroidday.org/) looks impressive, with an official movie, a petition to sign, and a schedule of events all over the world.
True, the odds of Earth getting hit on any one day are pretty small, but someday it will happen, because it’s happened many times before. Hopefully, by the time a legitimate threat is identified, we’ll be ready. I’m glad somebody is thinking about it today.
For more on The Planetary Society, visit http://www.planetarysociety.org/ I’m a member, and they put out a nice quarterly magazine.