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In an interview with Roy Britt, senior science writer for space.com, David Morrison of NASA Ames Research Center, suggests that scientists are on track to discover 90% of large Near Earth Asteroids by 2008 and that the next target should be to catalogue smaller NEOs. As well as being the official responsible for NASA's Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards website Morrison is also the chair of the working group on NEOs of the International Astronomical Union. In the early 1990s, he chaired a committee that produced the Spaceguard Survey Report, which urged NASA and the US Congress to find all NEOs larger than 1 kilometre.
David Morrison suggests that there is only a small chance that any undiscovered 1 km asteroid will collide with the Earth. "I think probably by 2008, when we have 90 percent of the larger NEOs catalogued, we will have concluded that none of them is a risk." However, even so Morrison says it is well worth continuing the search. "The possibility that we're unlucky, that an impact might create a truly global catastrophe and kill hundreds of millions of people, motivates us to carry out the search and be concerned about this issue even though it's a low probability risk."
After all 1 km asteroids have been identified Morrison suggests that the next goal will be to find the smaller NEOs. "One group that has considered the next level is in the United Kingdom. The UK NEO Task Force recommended two years ago that we set another goal, that we raise the bar and focus on 300-meter objects, which requires a new generation of search telescopes. In the United States, we haven't done anything either to build such telescopes or even to plan for it."
David Morrison's full interview can be seen at space.com.
More info: Space.com Article
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