The Tunguska Event and the History of Near-Earth Objects

Details The Tunguska Event and the History of Near-Earth Objects The Tunguska Event and the History of Near-Earth Objects

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20910801y&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #108.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

At 7:17 o’clock in the morning of June 30, 1908 a 60 meter-sized asteroid exploded over the Tunguska region of Russian Siberia, leveling trees for some 22 miles from the blast center. Today, the Tunguska blast is used as the only example of a witnessed and documented Earth impact by a substantial near-Earth asteroid. Although striking Earth with the impact energy of 15 mega tons of TNT, the Tunguska event had very little effect upon contemporary views of Earth impacts by neighboring comets and asteroids. While Edmond Halley had pointed out in 1694 that comets could strike the Earth with catastrophic consequences, the far more numerous potentially hazardous asteroids were unknown until the discovery of asteroid 1862 Apollo in 1932 the first asteroid found to actually cross the Earth’s orbit. It was only in the second half of the last century when astronomers generally believed that the moon’s craters were largely due to asteroid impacts rather than volcanoes and more recent still before the realization that there are likely more than 20,000 asteroids large enough to cause serious consequences to Earth’s surface and close enough to Earth’s orbit to pose a near-term threat. The Tunguska event of 1908 could have been used to lead toward these conclusions much earlier but this was not to be the case because of the lack of information on this remote event, the initial unwillingness of most professional astronomers to attribute the lunar craters to impact events and because it was realized only recently that the Earth’s neighborhood is crowded with potential asteroid impactors.

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