{"id":18903,"date":"2017-06-24T21:14:08","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T13:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/are-asteroids-leaving-the-spotlight-no-way-say-asteroid-day-activists\/"},"modified":"2017-06-24T21:14:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T13:14:08","slug":"are-asteroids-leaving-the-spotlight-no-way-say-asteroid-day-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/are-asteroids-leaving-the-spotlight-no-way-say-asteroid-day-activists\/","title":{"rendered":"Are asteroids leaving the spotlight? No way, say Asteroid Day activists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An artist\u2019s concept shows asteroids zooming past Earth (NASA \/ Asteroid Day Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA may be closing down its grand plan to study a piece of an asteroid up close, but the researchers who focus on near-Earth objects aren\u2019t turning their backs on massive space boulders.<\/p>\n

They say it\u2019s just a matter of time before we\u2019ll be forced to head off a threatening asteroid. On Friday, they\u2019ll be calling attention to the challenge \u2014 and what scientists and activists are doing to address it.<\/p>\n

For the past two years, the organizers of Asteroid Day have focused on June 30 as a time to turn an international spotlight on planetary defense. The date marks the anniversary of the Tunguska explosion, a presumed asteroid strike that destroyed half a million acres of forest in Siberia in 1908.<\/p>\n

This year, with the United Nations\u2019 encouragement, 190 countries around the world are planning a total of more than 700 Asteroid Day events, ranging from planetarium shows and virtual reality tours to a 24-hour streaming video marathon.<\/p>\n

Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight is hosting Asteroid Awareness Day, which will feature fun activities for the kids and live-stream lectures for the grownups.<\/p>\n

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Kids in Chile hold up drawings in celebration of Asteroid Day.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the organizers of the worldwide Asteroid Day event is former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, executive director of the nonprofit B612 Foundation\u2019s Asteroid Institute.<\/p>\n

More than a decade ago, Lu proposed a method for diverting an asteroid that was on a long-term collision course for Earth, by stationing a spacecraft near the asteroid and letting its gravitational attraction pull the asteroid ever so gently into a non-threatening trajectory.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgravity tractor\u201d concept would have been tested during NASA\u2019s Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM, which had been planned for the mid-2020s. The Obama administration championed ARM, but now that President Donald Trump is in the White House, it\u2019s being defunded.<\/p>\n

Despite ARM\u2019s cutoff, Lu says other studies focusing on how to deflect potentially threatening asteroids will move forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still think a test of a gravity tractor would be very useful,\u201d he told GeekWire.<\/p>\n

Lu points to future space shots such as the European Space Agency\u2019s Asteroid Impact Mission and NASA\u2019s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which is designed to smash a probe into an asteroid and see how much its trajectory changes. NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx mission, launched last September, aims to bring bits of an asteroid back to Earth for study in 2023.<\/p>\n

NASA says the data produced during ARM\u2019s planning stages will be used to guide preparations for future missions. \u201cAsteroid encounter mission concepts remain of interest due to the broad array of benefits for the human and robotic exploration, science, planetary defense and asteroidal resources communities,\u201d the space agency said in this month\u2019s ARM update.<\/p>\n