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This Science Definition Team was chartered to study what should be
done to find near-Earth objects less than 1 kilometer in size. While impacts
by these smaller objects would not be expected to cause global devastation,
impacts on land and the tsunamis resulting from ocean impacts could still
cause massive regional damage and still pose a significant long-term hazard.
In 1998 NASA commenced its part of the "Spaceguard" effort, with the goal of
discovering and tracking over 90% of the near-Earth objects larger than one
kilometer by the end of 2008. An Earth impact by one of these relatively
large objects would be expected to have global consequences and, over time
scales of a few million years, they present the greatest impact hazard to
Earth. Approximately 60% of the estimated 1,000 to 1,200 large near-Earth
objects have already been discovered, about 45% since NASA efforts started,
and each of the five NASA-supported search facilities continue to improve
their performance, so there has been good progress toward eliminating the
risk of any large, undetected impactor.
To understand the next steps to discovering the population of potentially
hazardous asteroids and comets whose orbits can bring them into the Earth's
neighborhood, NASA turned to this Science Definition Team of 12 scientists.
The Team, chaired by Dr. Grant Stokes of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was
asked to study the feasibility of extending the search effort to the far
more numerous, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of near-Earth objects whose
diameters are less than one kilometer.
NASA considers the Science Definition Team's findings to be preliminary, and
a much more in-depth program definition, refining objectives and estimating
costs, would need to be conducted prior to any decision to continue
Spaceguard projects beyond the current effort to 2008.
More info: Complete report in PDF format from JPL
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