Overview
- Tuesday’s 10th International Asteroid Day highlighted steady gains in planetary defense while experts warned that Earth still lacks enough dedicated telescopes to reliably find all hazardous asteroids.
- NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) provided the first real proof that a spacecraft can change an asteroid’s path by kinetic impact, moving mitigation from theory to an operational tool.
- Astronomers have catalogued roughly 40,000 near-Earth objects, but scientists say many more remain undetected because current surveys miss faint or thermally dark objects.
- To close that gap, NASA is preparing the infrared NEO Surveyor spacecraft, targeted to launch as early as fall 2027 and tasked with finding about two-thirds of potentially hazardous asteroids during its five-year mission.
- High-profile near-term targets frame the risk and the science: Apophis will pass very close to Earth in April 2029 with no impact expected for at least 100 years, and past scares such as 2024 YR4 were resolved by follow-up observations, showing both the need for rapid tracking and the value of new detection tools.