NASA Advances Mission
NASA last week announced that it has established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to formalize its efforts to detect and track near-Earth objects.
The PDCO will supervise all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth's orbit around the sun.
It will issue notices of close passes and warnings of any detected potential impacts, and will work with the Department of Defense, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other U.S. agencies and their international counterparts to respond to potential impacts.
About 1,500 near-Earth objects are detected each year, and more than 13,500 NEOs of all sizes have been discovered since NASA began funding surveys in 1998.
"We've found about 92 percent of objects larger than a kilometer in size out of an estimated population of a little over 1,000," said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA.
"Our goal was updated in 2005 to find those 140 meters and larger, and we've found about 7,000 of those out of an estimated population of 25,000 to 26,000," he told TechNewsWorld.
An NEO's size is measured by its longest axis.
Detailed description in the link below.