Koyal Group InfoMag - NASA Experts Continue To Engage United Nations On Asteroid Initiative

NASA supported the first IAWN Steering Committee meeting in January, as well as the first SMPAG meeting held in early
February. The IAWN and the SMPAG are independent of the United Nations, but keep the STSC updated on their
activities. NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground and
space-based telescopes. The NEOO program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” discovers these objects, characterizes a
subset that are of interest and plots their orbits into the future to determine whether any could be potentially
hazardous to our planet.
As of Feb. 1, 10,685 NEOs have been discovered, including about 97 percent of asteroids larger than .6 miles (one
kilometer). But there is a greater need to pinpoint smaller asteroids such as the one that impacted near Chelyabinsk,
Russia. NASA is mainly focused on finding asteroids larger than 459 feet (140 meters), and creating new ways to find
even smaller NEOs. NASA also is committed to developing new ways to search existing data to find these objects. In
September 2013, NASA announced a partnership with Planetary Resources to develop crowd-sourced software solutions
to enhance detection of NEOs in data already collected by NASA and agency partners.