The Department of Astronomy and Space at the College of Science, the University of Baghdad has published recently an article about the electronic discussion panel entitled “The Asteroid Day: Information and Facts” in the International Bulletin named (Asteroids) in cooperation with the National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research and the Arab Association for Astronomy and Space Sciences of the Union of Scientific Research Councils in Egypt.
This institution is a global non-profit organization operating under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice of Luxembourg and it is administrated by a number of astronomers, one of whom is a former Romanian astronaut. The panel discussion included lectures delivered by Prof. Dr. Ashraf Shaker, Prof. Dr. Hadia Salim from the National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research, Assist. Prof. Dr. Ahmed Abdul Razzaq and Dr. Anas Salman from the college of science, so as to highlight the basics of space exploration, scientific information about stars, planets, the sun and the moon in terms of their positions and movements, and the most prominent asteroids whose fall on the earth caused radical changes in the environment. The lecturers also asserted the need to employ the available technologies to detect and track near-earth objects that threaten human populations in order to raise awareness of the danger of asteroids and increase efforts to prevent their risks, as well as addressing meteorites or asteroids as being rocky bodies that penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and suffer from combustion due to the friction with the atmosphere where part of objects to the earth’s surface, such as the Tunguska event, which is an enormous explosion that happened before reaching the earth’s surface.