World Asteroid Day 2025: Watch live views of near-Earth asteroids for free online on June 30
World Asteroid Day 2025 is upon us! Here's how you can celebrate the event by livestreaming real-time views of near-Earth asteroids from the comfort of your home.
June 30 is the 10th anniversary of World Asteroid Day, an annual United Nations-backed event wherein partners raise awareness of asteroids, their scientific value and how humanity is working to mitigate the risks posed by these wandering solar system bodies. The date coincides with the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska event, which saw a large meteor detonate over Siberia, flattening millions of trees and triggering widespread forest fires.
The Virtual Telescope Program has announced a livestream to mark World Asteroid Day on June 30, which will feature real-time views of near-Earth asteroids while discussing the characteristics and impact risks posed by the enigmatic chunks of ancient debris. The stream will be hosted on the Virtual Telescope Project's YouTube channel starting at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) on June 30 and will be free to watch.
Our planet bears the scars of countless ancient asteroid strikes, the largest of which — such as the Chicxulub impactor — triggered the extinction of countless species, irrevocably altering the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth.
Thankfully, such events are exceedingly rare. Of the well over 30,000 near-Earth objects that have been discovered and tracked to date, no large asteroid capable of causing wide-spread destruction is expected to strike our planet in the next 100 years, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies.
Protecting the planet from an impending asteroid strike may once once have been the stuff of Hollywood sci-fi movies, but recent decades have seen the international community take tangible steps towards preparing for a potential asteroid collision.
A Planetary Defense Conference is held each year in which NASA, ESA and its partners work to prevent and react to a hypothetical asteroid impact. Each successive exercise has highlighted fresh challenges surrounding response strategies, ranging from the speed at which missions could be designed and launched to how to best gather intelligence and communicate with the general public.
Of course preparations have also extended far beyond tabletop simulations. September 2022 saw NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) made history when it slammed into the surface of the 160-meter-wide (252 feet) moonlet Dimorphos, which forms a binary pair with the larger asteroid Didymos. The mission proved that a kinetic impact could significantly deflect the trajectory of a small solar system body and so may be a viable strategy for defending Earth. The Didymos system is set to be visited by the European Space Agency's Hera mission in December 2026, which will observe the aftermath of the impact.
On top of that, telescopic eyes are constantly scanning the night sky for evidence of potentially hazardous near Earth objects moving against the starfield beyond. The coming years will see these efforts significantly bolstered by the powerful telescopic eye of the Vera Rubin observatory.
The Rubin Observatory's primary mission is to scan the entirety of the southern hemisphere night sky from its vantage point atop mount Cerro Pachon in Chile in a bid to shed light on the mysterious force known as 'dark energy' and an invisible component of the universe called 'dark matter'. However, its initial observations have also highlighted its credentials as an asteroid hunter.
TOP TELESCOPE PICK
Want to see asteroids in the night sky? The Celestron NexStar 4SE is ideal for beginners wanting quality, reliable and quick views of celestial objects. For a more in-depth look at our Celestron NexStar 4SE review.
Over the course of just a few nights, astronomers were able to identify 2,104 new near-Earth objects as they passed over the Rubin observatory's field of view, with some astronomers estimating that the observatory could find up to five million more over the coming years.
"This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko Ivezić, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during a press conference unveiling the observatory's first images on June 23. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Exotic 'blazar' is part of most extreme double black hole system ever found, crooked jet suggests
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A beam of particles speeding away from the vicinity of a monstrous black hole has been found to be severely kinked, providing compelling evidence that the black hole is actually part of the most extreme binary system known. The black hole and its crooked jet are found in a blazar known as OJ 287, located about four billion light-years away. A blazar is a quasar seen head-on, and a quasar is the active core of a galaxy where the resident supermassive black hole is pulling in huge amounts of matter. That matter spirals around the black hole, forming what's called an accretion disk, and there's so much matter that the accretion disk becomes a bottleneck. Rather than flowing into the black hole's maw, the infalling matter piles up in the disk, the density and temperature dramatically increasing such that it shines so brightly that it can be seen across the universe. Magnetic fields wrapped up in the accretion disk are able to funnel some of the charged particles in the matter away from the black hole, collimating them and accelerating them in two opposing jets that blast away from the black hole for thousands of light-years at close to the speed of light. Because we see blazars almost head-on, they appear even brighter than regular quasars. However, OJ 287 is not your ordinary blazar. Astronomers have been tracking its cycles of brightness variations for about 150 years — from even before they knew what kind of object it is. There's a long cycle of approximately 60 years, and a shorter cycle with a period of variation of just 12 years. This short cycle has been attributed to a companion black hole with about 150 million times the mass of the sun orbiting the main black hole, which has been claimed to have a mass equivalent to a whopping 18.35 billion suns. Both black holes are gargantuan compared to Sagittarius A*, which is the 4.1-million-solar-mass black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. The less massive black hole moves on an elongated, elliptical orbit. Every 12 years, it plows through the accretion disk of the more massive black hole. As it does so, it steals some of the matter from the disk and forms its own temporary accretion disk, with a temporary jet. For a short time, the OJ 287 system turns into a double quasar. At least, that's the hypothesis. Previous observations seem to support the idea. For example, in 2021, as predicted, the OJ 287 system dramatically increased in brightness in just 12 hours as the second black hole encountered the primary's disk and lit up as a quasar, releasing more energy in that short time than 100 average galaxies put together. Now, the most detailed image ever of the permanent jet blasting away from the more massive black hole, taken by a network of radio telescopes on Earth and in space, strongly supports the binary black hole model. "We have never before observed a structure in the OJ 287 galaxy at the level of details seen in the new image," said radio astronomer Efthalia Traianou of Heidelberg University in Germany, who led the observations, in a statement. The radio observations were performed by combining the 10 radio telescopes of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) across the United States with the RadioAstron 10-meter antenna on the Russian Spektr-R satellite. The observations were made between 2014 and 2017, and the mission itself ended in 2019, before Russia invaded Ukraine and was subjected to sanctions. Combined, the ground-to-space radio telescope network formed an interferometer with a baseline (i.e., its virtual aperture) that was five times the diameter of Earth, and this enabled sensational resolving power. The resulting image zooms in on the center of OJ 287, showing a region just a third of a light-year across. The radio-wavelength image shows that the black hole's jet is not straight, but is crooked with three distinct bends. The observations between 2014 and 2017 further revealed that the angle of the jet varied by about 30 degrees, and this image proves that the reorientation of the jet takes place very close to its point of origin. This severe reorientation could be the result of the gravity of the orbiting second black hole pulling on the jet, causing it to bend and precess about its axis. The radio wavelength images also captured a shock wave forming as the result of a new jet component. As this shock wave propagated up the jet, it released a torrent of high-energy gamma rays that were detected by the likes of NASA's Fermi Space Telescope and Swift mission. Some parts of the jet seem to radiate at an incredible 10 trillion degrees Celsius. Such a temperature seems unimaginable in human experience, and indeed this temperature is too hot to be true. It is an illusion in which we are seeing the effect of a phenomenon called relativistic beaming, where the Doppler effect boosts the luminosity of things that are moving toward us at close to the speed of light. As a potential binary black hole, OJ 287 has other important uses too. "Its special properties make the galaxy an ideal candidate for further research into merging black holes and the associated gravitational waves," said Traianou. RELATED STORIES — What are blazars? — Supermassive black holes: Theory, characteristics and formation — Black holes: Everything you need to know Although the two proposed black holes in the OJ 287 system will collide and merge eventually, this titanic event won't take place any time soon. However, their inevitable in-spiral into each other is releasing constantly weak gravitational waves. Our current gravitational-wave detectors cannot detect these gravitational waves because they are too weak and their wavelength is too great. Potentially, pulsar timing arrays, in which the timing of the regular-as-clockwork pulses from spinning pulsars become disrupted as gravitational waves pass between us and the pulsars, could detect the gravitational waves from OJ 287. Further into the future, the European Space Agency's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which is hoped to launch in the mid-2030s, could detect the eventual mergers of such binary supermassive black holes, which produce gravitational waves with wavelengths too long for Earth-bound detectors to spot. The findings were published on July 30 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
SpaceX, NASA scrub Crew-11 astronaut launch due to weather (video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX scrubbed today's (July 31) launch attempt of the Crew-11 astronaut mission for NASA. Launch officials called the scrub just over a minute before liftoff, due to a bank of cumulus clouds that appeared over in the skies over NASA's Kennedy Space Center here. "Unfortunately, the weather is just not playing alongside with today's excitement on the launch for NASA SpaceX's Crew-11," NASA commentator Derrol Nail said during today's launch coverage. "We could literally see the clouds kind of going over top of our heads, getting close to the pad, and the standoff area is a 10-mile radius around the pad for these dark clouds, cumulous clouds, and that is a safety factor," Nail added. "That is because you don't want to send a rocket through a tall cloud like that — that could generate some energy from the rocket passing through it." SpaceX will try again on Friday (Aug. 1) at 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 GMT). There's another chance on Saturday (Aug. 2) at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT). When it launches, Crew-11 will see a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket take off from Launch Complex 39A at KSC. Atop the rocket is the company's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft making its sixth flight, a reuse record for Crew Dragon vehicles. The four crewmembers of Crew-11 are NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Oleg Platonov of Russia's space agency Roscosmos. When it launches, Crew-11 will embark on a roughly 40-hour flight to catch up with the International Space Station, orbiting at a speed of about 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) some 248 miles (400 kilometers) above the surface of Earth. As its name implies, Crew-11 will be the eleventh operational astronaut mission SpaceX has flown for NASA, through the agency's Commercial Crew Program, which sees NASA send astronauts to and from the ISS on private spacecraft. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
SpaceX launches Crew-11 astronauts to the ISS for NASA on milestone Crew Dragon flight (video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. SpaceX launched its eleventh operational astronaut mission for NASA today (Aug. 1), sending the four Crew-11 astronauts on a flight toward the International Space Station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida at 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 GMT) today. Atop the rocket was the company's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft making its sixth flight, a reuse record for Crew Dragon vehicles. The launch occurred a day later than originally planned; SpaceX tried to get Crew-11 off the ground on Thursday (July 31) but had to scrub that attempt with about a minute left in the countdown clock due to intruding clouds. Just under eight minutes after launch, the mission's Falcon 9 booster came down for a landing at SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to KSC, creating a thunderous sonic boom audible for miles. This marked the last landing that will happen at LZ-1, which will now be retired. In March 2023, the U.S. Space Force announced that Launch Complex 13, where LZ-1 is located, will be leased to two private companies, Phantom Space and Vaya Space. The Space Force's announcement added that private providers like SpaceX can submit requests for landing zone capabilities at their own launch complexes, "which will then go through an extensive evaluation process." SpaceX still operates another booster landing site on the Cape, however, called Landing Zone 2. Crew-11 consists of NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Oleg Platonov of Russia's space agency Roscosmos. This will be the first spaceflight for Crew-11 commander Cardman, who was originally scheduled to launch on the Crew-9 mission. Cardman was removed from that mission because Crew-9 ended up launching to the International Space Station (ISS) with only two astronauts on board in order to make room for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the return trip. The duo were left without a dedicated ride home after the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that ferried them to the ISS on its first crewed test flight in June 2024 encountered leaks and propulsion issues. Fincke will be making his fourth trip to space on Crew-11 while serving as pilot, having previously flown three space shuttle missions to the ISS. As the most experienced spaceflyer, Fincke said he's looking forward to seeing the reactions of his crewmates, two of whom are making their first trip to orbit. "I remember how moving it was, and how breathtaking it was for me, and I want to share their joy in that," Fincke previously told Crew-11 marks the second spaceflight for mission specialist Kimiya Yui of Japan, who previously spent 142 days on the ISS during Expedition 44/45 in 2015. During that mission, Yui helped construct laboratory equipment in Japan's Kibo science module. Rounding out the crew is Russia's Oleg Platonov, who is making his first trip into space and serving as mission specialist. Once their spacecraft is docked safely on the ISS and the hatch is opened, the four Crew-11 astronauts will begin relieving the members of SpaceX's previous mission for NASA, Crew-10. Crew-11 docking is currently scheduled for 3 a.m. ET (0700 GMT) on Saturday (Aug. 2). NASA overlaps astronaut missions to the ISS as part of the agency's routine crew rotation in order to maintain a continuous presence on the space station. The Crew-10 and Crew-11 astronauts will overlap for about a week to ensure a smooth handover of science experiments and responsibilities, maintenance tasks and station operations. Related Stories: — SpaceX, NASA scrub Crew-11 astronaut launch due to weather (video) — SpaceX Crew-11 mission to the ISS: Live updates — Meet the SpaceX Crew-11 astronauts launching to the ISS After Crew-11 is settled in, the four Crew-10 astronauts — who launched in March 2025 — will make their way back down to Earth aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that brought them there. The Crew-11 astronauts will spend roughly six months aboard the orbital laboratory conducting science experiments that include simulating moon landings near the lunar south pole, testing how astronauts can protect their eyesight from the effects of microgravity, and studying how plant cells divide in space. In addition, the crew will conduct experiments to "produce a higher volume of human stem cells and generate on-demand nutrients," according to NASA. However, NASA is considering extending Crew Dragon missions to eight months, according to Dana Weigel, the International Space Station Program Manager at NASA. "We're looking at that right now for the Dragon flights, and so we are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11," Weigel said during a prelaunch press conference on Wednesday (July 30). Aside from relieving the Crew-10 astronauts for their return journey home, Crew-11 will see the arrival of the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-28 mission in November 2025, which will welcome NASA astronaut Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. A Northrop Grumman robotic resupply spacecraft is also expected to launch and dock during Crew-11's stay. As its name implies, Crew-11 is the eleventh operational astronaut mission SpaceX has flown for NASA, but the twelfth flight under the agency's Commercial Crew Program, in which NASA hired private companies to send astronauts to and from the ISS. The first Crew Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in June 2024 was also conducted under the program. Solve the daily Crossword
