On February 15th, 2013, a meteor entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia.
Afterwards, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired segment that provided a good synopsis of the event, and introduced the science behind asteroids. Sadly that segment is no longer online (shakes fist at old media types). Instead, here’s a short Youtube compilation of videos of the event:
Scientists and engineers have been thinking about the asteroid threat for decades, but it took the Chelyabinsk event to really shake the tree, and suddenly funding for asteroid research topics has TONS of funding at NASA. Woohoo. OK, so here we go …
As I’m sure many of you all know (just kidding) back in April 2013 the third annual Planetary Defense Conference was held in Flagstaff AZ. It opened with a public event conducted by the Planetary Society, meaning Bill Nye was the headliner. Here are the five segments of that event; watch if only to check out the wild adoration that Bill Nye receives pretty much wherever he goes:
public event part 1: Intros and What’s Up!
public event part 2: Meteorite Man Geoffrey Notkin
public event part 3: Bruce Betts Presents the Shoemaker NEO Grants
public event part 4: Bill Nye the Science Guy!
That evening event was then followed by two full days of conference proper, with dozens of scientists, engineers and private sector leaders giving presentations of various niches in the field of asteroid science. After the conference ended I watched ALL the session videos (some 20 hours) that they’d put up on Livestream. The presentations were fantastic! I’ll link to them here:
All 15 videos: http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/folder
Example direct link to an individual video: http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/video?clipId=pla_fe7856c5-495b-4e17-9312-e25344d2b849
In late September, NASA held a multi-day “Asteroid Initiative Workshop”. The sessions from the first day appeared on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJRJyljzwTA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INBt1iLJk_Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGhXcGztpI8 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoqesv4Cm68
* my personal favorite presentation is in this one, at the 27m30s point
I wondered, though, why the later presentation were nowhere to be found. Eventually I checked the NASA Asteroid Initiative Workshop website and found that the workshop actually had to shut down after the first day due to … the federal government shutdown! Riiiight, of course, the first day was on Sept 30th, just before the shutdown.
The workshop was eventually rescheduled for Nov 20-22, and those videos are all here:
Partnerships and Participatory Engagement, parts 1 2 and 3:
Asteroid Crew Systems, parts 1 and 2:
Cosmic Explorations Speakers Session:
Grand Challenge Panel parts 1 and 2:
Capture Systems parts 1 and 2:
Redirection Systems parts 1 and 2:
Deflections Demonstrations parts 1 and 2:
Deflections Discussion parts 1 and 2:
Crowd Sourcing:
Summary Plenary Session:
Obviously only someone very interested in this topic would watch all of the above videos! But even if you aren’t, know that thousands of scientists are working very hard on this problem. With thousands if not millions of asteroids out there, all bigger and far more lethal than the Chelyabinsk meteor, it’s only a matter of time, probably only a few years, before we identify a meteor with our name on it. And then everyone will be paying attention to this again.