June 30 is "Asteroid Day," which is here to remind us that what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago when a 9 kilometer-wide asteroid struck the sea off Mexico will definitely occur again sometime in the future.

This, the K-Pg Extinction Event, wiped-out the dinosaurs and over 90 percent of life on Earth.

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Asteroid Day, however, marks the 108^th anniversary of the "Tunguska Event" in Siberia when the largest asteroid ever seen exploded in mid-air above a forest close to the Stony Tunguska River. This incredibly powerful explosion estimated at 15 million tons of TNT laid waste to 2,000 square kilometers of forest but caused no human casualties in this desolate and sparsely populated wilderness.

The 1908 Tunguska asteroid was estimated at only 190 meters wide. It's the largest known impact event on Earth in recorded history.

The threat of deadly asteroids hitting the Earth and causing horrific loss of life is real since over a million asteroids have the potential to hit the Earth. Despite their best efforts, scientists worldwide have only discovered one percent of these asteroids, according to Asteroid Day, an organization hoping to prevent an asteroid from again practically wiping out life on Earth.

The goal of the talks, seminars and movies about asteroids to be held around the world today is to increase awareness about these deadly hunks of space rock, said Grigorij Richters, who founded the organization along with astrophysicist Brian May and three others.

"This year we really got some solid support from the space agencies. NASA and everyone is on board. We're doing more than ever before," said Richters.

Asteroid Day has launched the "100X Declaration" that calls on governments to increase their asteroid discovery rate 100 times -- to 100,000 -- within the next decade. Some 17,000 individuals have signed the online declaration.

"The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it became that the human race has been living on borrowed time," said May.

In August 2013, NASA released a new map of "potentially hazardous asteroids" (PHAs) showing the orbital paths of more than 1,400 asteroids known approach too dangerously close to the Earth. None of the asteroids mapped pose an impact threat to Earth within the next 100 years, however, said NASA.

"These are the asteroids considered hazardous because they are fairly large (at least 460 feet or 140 meters in size), and because they follow orbits that pass close to the Earth's orbit (within 4.7 million miles or 7.5 million kilometers)," according to NASA.

TagsAsteroid Day, June 30, K-Pg Extinction Event, Tunguska Event