Is the Earth at risk from an asteroid impact? Can we protect the Earth from a catastrophic collision? What can we learn from asteroids? These, and other questions set the scene for the International Asteroid Day celebrations that took place at the University of Liverpool on 30 June 2026.
International Asteroid Day is a UN-sanctioned annual global event aiming to educate the public about asteroid risks and space defence strategies as well as to raise awareness about research on these fascinating celestial bodies. Asteroid Day commemorates the Tunguska event of 1908, in which an asteroid fell on a remote area of Siberia causing a huge explosion and extensive damage to the surrounding forest.
Hosted by Dr Stefania Soldini’s group, the Asteroid Day celebrations were organised around two events, a workshop for secondary school children in the morning and a public exhibition and talk for the public in the afternoon.
Some 80 secondary school children from local schools and their teachers had the opportunity to participate in the morning workshop, which featured an introduction to planetary defence by Dr Soldini, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool’s School of Engineering and director of the Zero-G AstroLab, and a by Dr Ashley King, researcher at the Natural History Museum London, about the role of asteroids in building a habitable solar system.
The talks were followed by fun hands-on demonstrations, in which the students had the opportunity to chat with our scientists and learn more about asteroids and research. They saw how craters are formed by dropping stones on a tray with flour and, through a game in which they had to guide a blindfolded colleague through an obstacle course, they could experience in themselves how satellites operate in space. The most popular activity was the “egg-drop challenge”, in which the students had to design and build a “spacecraft” to safely land an egg launched from a height, without breaking it.
The workshop had an enthusiastic response, and 8 out of 10 attendees declared that they were more interested in space science as a result of the event.
The afternoon session was open to the public and consisted of an exhibition featuring information about asteroids and space missions, the first public showcase of our BEATLE robot (Bearing-free Experiment for an Autonomous Testbed in a Low-gravity Environment), as well as rockets and other artifacts from the students’ association LASER (Liverpool Association for Space Engineering Research).
The exhibition was followed by an engaging talk by Duncan Lyster, a researcher from the University of Oxford who specialises in Trojan asteroids, a group of asteroids which share an orbit with Jupiter and are believed to contain some of the most pristine remnants of the early formation of the Solar System.
All in all, the Asteroid Day was, in the words of one of the students, an “eggceptional” experience.