On Thursday, June 30, at 4:00 pm PDT | 7:00 pm EDT | 23:00 UTC (International Times: http://bit.ly/28YW91a), Slooh is celebrating World Asteroid Day with four hours of live programming and an amazing roster of guests, including Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who recently published a criticism of NASA’s approach to asteroid detection. During the show, Slooh will also celebrate the accomplishment of member Goran Gasparovic, who on June 10th discovered asteroid 2016 LO49 using Slooh’s Canary Island Observatory, the first Slooh member to discover an asteroid via Slooh. Science Channel joins Slooh in pushing awareness for Asteroid Day by promoting the live event socially, and teaming up to bring additional asteroid content to the public.

Based on 10+ years of building public awareness of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), Slooh will shine a light on all of the fascinating aspects of asteroids, including detection, deflection and mining. We’ll talk about the number of asteroids out there on a potential collision course with Earth, the kind of danger they pose and what NASA and private organizations like Slooh and others are doing to mitigate that risk.

The live show kicks off at 7 pm EDT, featuring Slooh Astronomers, Paul Cox, Bob Berman and Eric Edelman who will revisit some of our favorite asteroids as they made their close approach to Earth, including Toutatis, The Beast, Apophis, Pitbull, and Spooky. We’ll demonstrate how Slooh members track and discover asteroids using Slooh’s Observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands. Over the course of the night, we’ll analyze the threat posed by potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) and break down the politics of asteroid tracking. We’ll review NASA’s efforts to detect asteroids, including an aborted partnership with the B612 Foundation, which had planned to launch an infrared space telescope into orbit around the Sun to detect asteroids that are impossible to see from Earth. Paul Cox will also be speaking with Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, who recently reported that some of the results previously published on NASA’s NEOWISE asteroid survey mission are irreproducible and overstate the accuracy of estimated sizes for many smaller asteroids. Dr. Myhrvold is an accomplished inventor, scientist, technologist, entrepreneur, and author. In recent years, he has published original scientific research in astronomy, paleontology, and climate science.

Slooh will also take a close look at opportunities presented by the millions of asteroids in our solar system. We’ll revisit one of our favorite asteroids, the $5 trillion asteroid, as we discuss the commercialization of asteroids, including very different approaches being taken by two pioneering companies; Planetary Resources is planning to visit asteroids to mine them for resources like water, while Made in Space plans to use materials found on asteroids to 3D print spaceships.

We’ll open the conversation up to the audience to address your concerns, taking questions from Twitter and our chat room on Slooh.com. We’ll also open up the discussion to the future of asteroid hunting, and present the possibility that asteroids may not be the biggest threat out there. Viewers can ask questions during the show on Twitter by sending them to @Slooh, or by using the chat room on Slooh.com.

Contact:
Tricia Ennis
+1 877-427-5664 x3
tricia@slooh.com

Event Timing:
Live Stream starts: 4:00 pm PDT | 7:00 pm EDT | 23:00UTC
Live Stream ends: 8:00 pm PDT | 11:00 pm EDT | 03:00UTC
International Timing: http://bit.ly/28YW91a

To watch Slooh’s live coverage:
http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/asteroid-day-2016

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Attention Planetariums, Universities, Astronomy Clubs & Organizations

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Slooh connects humanity through communal exploration of the universe. We gather people around live telescopes to see space for themselves and share their diverse perspectives. Since 2003, Slooh’s automated observatories have processed celestial images in real-time for broadcast to the Internet. Slooh members have taken over 4-million photos/500,000 FITS images of over 50,000 celestial objects, participated in numerous discoveries with leading astronomical institutions and made over 3,000 submissions to the Minor Planet Center. Slooh’s flagship observatories are situated on Mt. Teide, in partnership with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), and in Chile, in partnership with the Catholic University. Slooh has also broadcast live celestial events from partner observatories in Arizona, Japan, Hawaii, Cypress, Dubai, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and many more. Slooh’s free live broadcasts of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), comets, transits, eclipses, solar activity etc. feature narration by astronomy experts Paul Cox and Bob Berman and are syndicated to media outlets worldwide. Slooh signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA in March 2014 to “Bring the universe to Everyone and Help Protect Earth, Too.”