Fifth Asteroid Day is on June 30, 2019 But There Will Be a Full Week of Events

Asteroid Day is the official United Nations’ day of global awareness and education about asteroids. The World will celebrate the fifth anniversary on June 30, 2019. There will be thousands of independent events organized by citizens around the world on all five continents. Asteroid Day global programs, including Asteroid Day LIVE, are programs of the Asteroid Foundation, a Luxembourg-based nonprofit organization.

Asteroid Day was co-founded by astrophysicist and famed musician Dr. Brian May of the rock group QUEEN; Apollo 9 Astronaut Rusty Schweickart; Filmmaker Grig Richters; and B612 President Danica Remy, to promote awareness and provide knowledge to the general public about the importance of asteroids in the formation of our universe and the role they play in our solar system today.

B612 Summarizes the Scope of the Asteroid Issue

B612 is an organization that works towards protecting the Earth from asteroid impacts and informing and forwarding world-wide decision-making on planetary defense issues.

B612 has the 2018 annual report on Asteroids.

Of the over 18,000 NEOs known today (June 2018), there are nearly 2,000 objects classified as potentially hazardous objects (PHOs).

Global Asteroid Day Events in 2019

Events for Asteroid Day 2019 will take place on all five continents and are in the process of being organized by local organizations, and include:

In Europe: Luxembourg’s Ministry of Education, SpaceResources.lu and National Museum of Natural History are organizing events throughout the country. The Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria, will showcase the world’s largest meteorite collection. In Greece, the new Hellenic Meteorite Museum is hosting a variety of events.

In North America: Events will be held once again at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, in addition to other science centers, universities and astronomy clubs throughout the US, Canada and Mexico.

In South America: A group of astronomical backpackers called Mochileros Astronomicos, will hitchhike throughout the region to teach astronomy in schools, planetariums, and communities. Astronomical institutions across Brazil will discuss asteroids at events celebrating 100 years of the International Astronomical Union. Chile will have coordinated activities across the country.

In Africa: Mozambique will host a special presentation about asteroids on National TV (TVM), in coordination with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), at a special session during the National Astronomical Society Meeting. Egypt’s Scientific Society of Astronomy and Space will hold an event called “Asteroids and Safety of The Earth” at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Cairo.

In Asia: Kazakhstan Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, in Almaty will host lectures and activities for students. Throughout Israel, events are being organized at the Givatayim Observatory, Netanya Planetarium and the Yarqa Space Center.

Preview of 2019 ASTEROID DAY Events in Luxembourg

27 June: Technical Briefing with Asteroid Experts (by invitation)
28 June: Asteroid Day LIVE Global Broadcast-Webcast, produced at RTL Studios
29 June: Astronaut and Asteroid Expert meet and greet (public)
29 June: Gala Dinner in the unique Cercle Cité, Downtown Luxembourg (tickets on sale now)
30 June: Asteroid Day at the National Museum of Natural History: Guided tours of the Meteorite Collection and “Universe” Exhibition; Public Lecture “Asteroids… can we deal with the danger?”; Asteroid Workshop for Youth

ASTEROID DAY LIVE FROM LUXEMBOURG: 28 JUNE, 2019

37 thoughts on “Fifth Asteroid Day is on June 30, 2019 But There Will Be a Full Week of Events”

  1. …massive beach waves not proven to be caused by Global Warming.

    Those home values have not dropped because of that, too.

  2. I just had a terrible thought with the hill comment. Pumped hydro, but with flow battery reactants instead of water for a 1-2 punch.

    Though considering china, one wonders why they haven’t got around to doing sisyphean railways for energy storage like ARES.

  3. What you said was mostly right, except for the part “Also if the monitor the flues they know how much coal they are burning.”

    See, you give the “monitoring the flues” too much credence. Simply the “monitoring” ins’t quantitative, even to ±30% standards. They can (with industrial resilience) measure pressure; they can measure CO₂ fraction-of-gas (sort of, the sensors are finicky and get poisoned rapidly), they can easily measure temperature, but not so easily relative dryness of the exhaust stream. 

    Moreover, the exhaust stream can (and sometimes nefariously is engineered to be) anisotropic (not well mixed).  

    The gas you measure “here”, next to the “left wall” is of one composition whilst the main flow is of quite another. Classical “engineering cheating 101”, actually. 

    Remember Mr. Rossi and his infamous steam generators and the first 9 months of vigorous debate about how much free water liquid was part of the water-and-air vapor stream? That kind of thing.

    As I said.
    You give the measure-er too much credence. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  4. True… because 10,000 MW of nuclear (let’s agree to call it 10 GW) would deliver just about 80,000 GWh of electricity. 

    Assuming that one could actually build maybe 20 GW of solar for $39 B (its definitely cheaper per watt than nuclear, even in China), you still are only good for maybe 17% of 8670 hours; 20 GW × 8670 × 0.17 → 30,000 GWh/year, which is only 37% of the nuclear output. 

    Not only that, but it is capricious: subject to the vicissitudes and perversity of The Weather, The Seasons and The Elements. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  5. Folks – there are 2 things about China that hardly get mention and answers a lot about what happened to their renewable energy sector. One – the national strategy is ONLY about political stability (no. 1) and economic growth (no.2). The political side is basically very secure because it is easy to do. The economic side is much harder, but they try, China Style. The main energy strategy is to provide power. Co2 is completely and totally irrelevant to China, to the NDRC (who makes policy) and to the CPC. The ONLY thing that matters is generating enough reliable power. Solar and wind are not reliable and therefore, inconsequential to national power security. What influences the power strategy is what Sinopec, CNOOC, BAIC and other SOE’s, chip makers etc need to function. Also in this mix are the hundreds of millions of homes who need the lights on and power working 24/7.

    The second thing about China is that they are the ultimate penny pinchers. Solar and wind power got started as offshoots to huge SOE power companies who saw a potential export market. It worked. Then, the Chinese SOEs sold off the excess PVs domestically to faraway places not connected to the grid. Grift, basically. The power SOEs got subsidies to do this. Those subsidies are now history because the even more powerful industrial SOE’s who want cheaper power were pissed that they were paying other SOEs for this boondoggle.

  6. Another huge blow to turning around climate change.

    Not unless Global Warming is a fraud and the Chinese government knows it just like the insurance actuaries of the policies covering all those Malibu beach front houses also do.

  7. China will not approve wind and solar power projects unless they can compete with coal power prices. China stopped subsidizing large scale solar projects in May, 2018.

    In 2017, 12% of wind generation and 6% of solar wasted because the power grid could not use the generated power.

    So much for the wu mau BS posted here by Godfree and others claiming how China will be becoming a ‘renewable superpower’, etc, etc.

    There is no such thing as a ‘renewable superpower’. The Math & Economics NEVER WILL MAKE IT WORK. You know? Math? Economics? No? Mother Gaia doesn’t approve?

    Well, too bad! If Satan and the Flying Spaghetti Monster conceived a fetus that tested for Down’s Syndrome and was thus aborted, that abortion would be Mother Gaia, greentards!

    New solar and wind renewable power projects will have to show that the grid can handle their output and that the price will be lower than coal.

    I wonder: If Chinese communist leaders can grow a brain based upon reality, then why can’t California communist leaders do the same?

  8. There is usually a organization that controls the generators within a power pool. Many times this organization is pseudo-governmental. There is usually metering on the transmission lines tie to the generation lines. You can’t really trust people on telling you how much they generated. The government can always have access to this. Also if the monitor the flues they know how much coal they are burning.

  9. “And the American stands up, and says “I’m not going to lie. I can’t stop. I’ve cut down but I’m still going to have a beer each day.”

    The American has gone from a case of beer a day to one bottle of wine a day and is offering to sell wine at $3 a bottle to everyone else.

  10. Sounds like you are describing Vanadium flow batteries. Tank A and B are full of Vanadium one tank with more electrons than the other tank. Need more MWhrs? Just add bigger tanks.

  11. All that air pollution is vastly expensive – it’s not paid by the polluters but those who breath the air and try to live with it.

  12. I rather like thinking on it “the other way around”. 

    If we imagine that unconventional fuel-cell batteries might reasonably be made at specific power densities and so on that are attractive, then one could envision very large tanks of “fluid A and B” that are the cation and anion donors for the fuel cells. 

    Especially if trivially reversible (i.e. can be charged as easily as discharged), then on a plot of land far smaller than a pumped-hydro facility, one might plausibly stick a flow-fuel battery substation consisting of 2 tanks on a hill. You know, of the size that one sees almost everywhere there is a refinery. Fluid A and B. 

    Maybe a pair of 3rd and 4th tanks, to hold “spent A” and “spent B”. Still, we’re just talking tankage. Neither fancy nor expensive. 

    Thing is, if the A and B fluids are potent enough potential energy reactants, then perhaps utilities could envision shipping (by truck, rail, ship) the “charged up” or “depleted” A and B fluids all over the place. You know, like conventional petroleum, but with a particularly delightful electrolytic purpose. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  13. “its a natural consequence of the subsidies (inverse tariffs) and state-run regional and municipal civic infrastructure ‘bidding’. Terrible value proposition. Open bidding is often much superior, tho’ it has its share of end-run and insider-leaking cheating issues, too.”

    There, how’s that for paraphrasing what you said?

    I would agree with it, thus penned.
    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  14. Yep. And I like your “cheating analogy” above too. The 100,000 tons just kind of disappears. Like magic. Unicorn horn wands. Poof. GoatGuy

  15. ” I do agree with some of what you say “

    I’m intrigued. Where do you think Goat is wrong?

    I would say that he has missed one extra coal usage method. If I have a coal power station (which I don’t (yet, (growth mindset))) and I tell the government that I burned 1 million tonnes, used 8000 tonnes/coal per GWh, and so generated 125 GWh this year, sold it for X, here is my tax on that income…

    Well maybe I burned an extra 10%, sold an extra 10%, made a extra 10% profit… and didn’t pay tax on that.

    Well that extra 100 000 tonnes of coal is just going to disappear off the books isn’t it?

  16. There is one issue with your analogy: There is no cop. There is just the “reformed” alcoholic standing up in his meeting and saying “My name is PRC and it’s been … err… 5 years since my last drink. Hic!”

    And to be fair the rest of the room nods along and secretly does a shot out of their hidden hip flasks before saying much the same thing.

    And there is a small group down the front who actually mean it, and can’t work out why it isn’t working.

    And the American stands up, and says “I’m not going to lie. I can’t stop. I’ve cut down but I’m still going to have a beer each day.”

    And everyone else rolls their eyes, does another secret swig from the hip flask, and stands up to condemn the Yank for not agreeing to stop.

  17. In NYC the monitoring of power plants flue is 24×7. No reason why it can’t be the same in China. I do agree with some of what you say because in China they still cook and heat homes with coal. That is something the government has to stop. It is silly that the people complain about the air but they still burn coal.

  18. It’s a natural consequence of feed-in-tariffs and lack of competitive bidders. They’re terrible at providing value. Competitive bids in an open auction are way way better.

    China had feed-in-tariffs plus picking winners (the local factory). Double bad. They’re now banning both.

  19. Peaker replacement battery *systems* go for $250/kWh today, at the battery pack level for cars, it is more like $130/kWh. The same ratio goes for solar farms. A complete system is a bit over $1/W, while a solar panel is in the $0.42 range in the US.

  20. Utility scale pumped hydro scales easily to GWhr with power production in the hundreds of MW and costs 1/10th to 1/8th of what Lithium ion batteries cost.

    And it doesn’t have a mass adoption.

    While the “Immediate-on” aspect of batteries is nice, it really is unnecessary. You can make a hybrid storage plant that has enough battery to provide power while the turbines get up to speed. Best of both worlds.

  21. Coupling expensive power storage to wind/solar solves the intermittent production problem but makes your power much more expensive. China needs cheap and clean power.

  22. Municipal solar isn’t a term used in the industry. You have residential rooftop, non-residential (like Walmart and Target store roofs), and utility-scale, regardless if it is privately or municipally owned. Utility-scale is more like $1/W than $3.50/W

    Source: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-report-2018-q4

    Note that residential solar competes against residential electric rates, while the other categories compete against industrial or wholesale rate.

  23. “China had provided subsidies of $15.6 billion in 2017 and was on track to subsidize renewables for $39 billion in 2020.”

    That isn’t sustainable even for China. Also $39 billion would build 10 AP1000s in China which is going to produce far more clean power than $39 billion worth of solar.

  24. Most of the “air pollution in major cities” comes from the burners-of-{coal-and-heavy petroleum} that bypass their plants’ flue-gas scrubbers and filtering towers when the official monitors are not on duty. That, and there is a HUGE business of using “fell-off-the-train” coal, dating back to the Mao era when everyone was instructed how to smelt iron on a mom’n’pop basis. The Great Cultural Revolution.

    As a consequence, “for show”, the larger businesses have their steam generators, their industrial water heaters, their boilers and their process-heat systems fired “officially” from cleaner energy sources.  Or have nice shiny scrubbers and flue-gas filters. In reality, a lot of them are “dual fuel”, taking fell-off-train coal which is far cheaper per gigajoule of useable heat.  This is why, conspicuously, you will see hills of ash not far from the ostensibly cleaner-fuel fired plants. The ash has to go somewhere, when using coal. There’s a LOT of it.  

    Its like the “reformed alcoholic”, pulled over by the cop: “Have you been drinking, miss?” … “ahem, urp, um… not a drop, Officer. I’m a reformed alcoholic!” … the copper takes a deep whiff, and can smell jet-fuel aplenty. Reformed indeed. This is China.  A very close analogy, actually.

    GoatGuy

  25. Step away from the Laughing Gas bottle, friend.  

    The issue here is China and India, and the “Silk Road”.  The number of coal fired power plants is continuing to grow almost without observable pro-ecological impact. That’s what is sad. Not whether Solar and Wind must finally “make a buck”.  

    I recently saw an unofficial estimate that China mines more than 35% more coal than is accounted in the “official statistics” of their production and municipal / government / industrial use. So much Chinese mined coal just “falls off the trains”; the country still has a population of desperately poor people (and thread-bare mom’n’pop small industries, too) that depend heavily on the “cat and mouse” availability of fell-off-the-train coal to power … everything from heating to cooking to hot water, to smelting, to wildcat power production. And, while the Chinese petrochemical industry is trying to produce more “LPG” (liquified petroleum gas) AKA “propane” (in the West), which is a compellingly cleaner fuel-gas for domestic and small business use, the truth is, every kilogram of the stuff comes from imported foreign oil. 

    And the Chinese don’t like that. So, they officially decry “falling off train” coal, and periodically make a Big Show out of arresting someone. The arrestees never go to court, they’re quietly back in business a few weeks later, and all night long the coal sacks are delivered to all the homes, laundries, small manufacturing plants that need it. 

    GoatGuy

  26. I just don’t know… the price of competent large-scale batteries hasn’t really come down all that much in the last couple of years. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t: there seems to be a lot of overhead in making competent durable long-life, high-energy capacity batteries.  

    Presently, “just guessing” (since no one knows, really), the 72 kW Tesla car battery is said to cost about $250 per kilowatt hour. $18,000.  (you can find used ones all day long on EBay for $15,000 to $18,000! And they’re used!)

    These kind of batteries have perhaps 2,000 kWh of useable energy for every kWh of battery pack capacity, if treated well, not charged too quickly, not discharged too heavily.  

    $18,000 for (72 × 2,000 = 144,000 kWh), at 3.5% (again) over 10 years… is $0.15 per kWh of in-out cycle energy.  

    I just don’t know where the dude (CEO Robo? … see NewtonPulsifier’s article) that coined these numbers (in the article) has any credibility. We definitely are NOT at $100 a kWh. Anywhere. Even prismatic cells are well above $200/kWh.  

    Sheesh…  to get below $0.05/kWh storage is going to require deep discounts.
    GoatGuy

  27. Moreover, what does it really cost for municipal-scale Solar?  

    No, not JUST the cost of the panels, frames, but the total development cost. 

    Engineering, ecological impact assessment studies, university and academic outreach, marketing-to-investors, planning, land preparation, civil engineering “stuff” — pilings, roadways, drainage, footings, frames … then the labor of purchasing, receiving, installation, electrical hookup, piecemeal certifications, sector certs, fault tolerant redundancy certifications, full system power certification, access-to-grid system engineering, testing, certification, and FINALLY the “flip the switch to ON” playbook politics, ribbon cutting, photo-op picture and video taking, drone overflights, marketing department production, media outreach, endless free activist dinners and lunches.  

    What does it really cost?  

    Clearly, all day long (until the Chinese cut off the flow of cheap goods), we can buy solar panels for 85¢/W … for really quite nice ones. Not 30 year panels, but more like 10-15 (or more with post-acquisition upgrades). By the container. Direct from dock.  

    But what about all the rest of it? Is it even possible to get municipal solar for less than $3.50 a watt?  Given 1 watt is only 1.5 kWh/year, 

    $3.50 financed for 20 years, 3.5% interest, 1.5 kWh/W … is $0.21 a kWh. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  28. Regarding (kWh/kW-year), algebraically, you can cancel the kW’s, if you like:

    kWh/kWyr → h/yr

    Then, take that and divide by potential hours per year

    h/yr → h/8760

    Which yields the effective utilization (and highlights the concerning production gap) of a solar facility.

    1500 ÷ 8760 → 17.1%

    This is why most utilities only do solar significantly as “media friendly” development projects.  It looks good, it makes the armies of endlessly green Gen-Xers happy, it keeps the utilities out of the gunsight of the eco-warrior types.  Sort of.  Oh look! Over there! A shooting star! (scuttles away quickly)

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  29. I don’t know… the corpus of the article was that China has grown weary of the makers-of-solar-panels (and associated “system” stuff) charging way less in foreign countries than in China itself. Reflecting, one might assess, that perhaps the Chinese manufacturers, again, as has happened in much of the past, have been “dumping” (but in reality, just aggressively underpricing) solar product, mostly to the EU and USA, in exchange for hard-currency exchange.  

    I understand it: the real value of yuan in China is rather less than the official exchange rate value.  Dollars and Euros (and Pounds, and Ryals, Pesos, Krona and even Rubles) are simply worth more than the official exchange rate. So, it looks like they’re “underpricing” in a trade-war sense, but in truth, the exchange rate equalizes things out. 

    Still, with steerable panels, over a typical year, in a location not bedeviled with cloud cover, dusts, hazes and bird shît, or mountainous shadows, (i.e. flat deserts), one might not-unreasonably expect 28% of 24 hr/day of energy-capture. 6.7 to maybe even 7 kWh/day.  

    That however is unusual. Most panels go to 5 kWh/kW-day or lower locations. Averaged over a year, 1500 kWh/kW-year is considered good. By comparison, your average nuclear plant delivers 8,400 kWh/kW-year, or 5.6× more. For the same “plate kilowatts”. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  30. Adding batteries to that equation turns that wasted electricity into the most valuable (peaker) electricity.

    The government might even have to mandate limits to grid battery installations because it’s going to destroy coal so fast.

    China may very well have a ‘too big to fail’ moment. Imagine 90% of their coal power plants going obsolescent in 7 years.

    Saving capitalism = genociding the planet. The elders on our planet now care more about their bank accounts and luxury retirements than the future of the Earth. But I guess we ‘have to keep it civil’.

  31. Many future generations lost in Kleenex around the world. Time to overthrow the Kleenex conspiracy? Will you pay the cost to save humanity? Only you can answer that question.

  32. “Lost future renewable generation”

    That’s a head scratcher right there!

    Lost future generation in a Kleenex too.

  33. Another huge blow to turning around climate change. They are intending to replace the lost future renewable generation with coal. Probably has to do with the economic slow down in China and budgetary cuts. Are we sealing our fate?

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