The astronomy division of the Arthur C Clarke Institute (ACCIMT) is annually organizing an awareness program to celebrate the World Asteroid Day. Asteroid Day is an annual global event which is held on the anniversary of the Siberian Tunguska event took place on June 30, 1908, the most harmful known asteroid-related event on Earth in recent history.
Since 2017 the Arthur C Clarke institute is organizing programs focusing on school children to aware the importance of near earth objects (NEO’s) as they have some potential to make a collision with the earth. Hence the awareness programs are organizing around the world focusing the young community. The ACCIMT also invited school children and university students, who are the future scientist and engineers, to our asteroid day awareness program. We initiated a community to start focusing on this understanding the importance of this program to conduct annually.

In 2019, we invited 100 school children in Colombo area for the program. The program had two sessions of invited talks. One was conducted by Dr. Nalin Samarasinghe, Senior Scientist, Planetary Science Institute, Arizona, USA. Dr. Samarasinghe dedicates his life on the studies of comets and asteroids and gains the world’s recognition by naming asteroid 12871 as Samarasinha. He joined the program through Skype.

The second session was conducted by Prof. Chandana Jayaratne, Professor in Physics, University of Colombo. The students got the opportunity to examine closely the set of meteoroids found in Sri Lanka in his talk.       

In 2020, due to the COVID 19 pandemic situation, we organized a webinar on World Asteroid Day. A presentation on “Small Bodies of the Solar System: Influencing Life and Death on Earth” was done by Dr. Nalin Samarasinha.

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