Asteroid Day is celebrated every year on June 30 because it's the date of the Tunguska Event. This was one of the largest explosions to happen in modern times caused by an object from space entering the Earth's atmosphere. Read more about it in this NASA article written on the 100th anniversary in 2008: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30jun_tunguska

Due to the pandemic, this year's Asteroid Day is mainly an online celebration, although the video stream will be shown at the museum on the 30th. The day includes a huge number of interviews and documentaries including astronomers and researchers who study asteroids. One of them is New Mexico's own Mark Boslough, who was a physicist at Sandia Labs and now works on planetary defense at Los Alamos Labs. Dr. Boslough did groundbreaking research into the power of an asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk in 2013. Find out more about him here: https://asteroidday.org/people/dr-mark-boslough

Astronomy Day online programming actually stated at the first of June and will continue until July 4. A video called "Incoming!" was previously presented in the museum's planetarium, but a flat-screen version is now one of the many shows included in the broadcast. Don't miss all the interesting live programs happening throughout the day on June 30: https://asteroidday.org