NASA in hurry to build an asteroid-detecting telescope

Astrophysicists are used to working with huge time scales, thanks to universe's apparently infinite size. However, the scientists are gearing to build a next-generation space telescope with a sense of urgency. The new Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) will be looking for asteroids that are on a collision course with our planet.

"The question is, when is the next one going to happen on a human time scale as well as a geological time scale?" asks Amy Mainzer, a CalTech Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, and NEOCam project team leader.

NASA has already recognized all the near-Earth asteroids bigger than 0.6 miles (1 km). Also, a new law was recently passed that required the space agency to catalog 90 percent of asteroids larger than 140 meters (460 ft) in diameter by 2020.

But NASA has admitted it will miss this deadline, claiming although 8,000 space rocks have already been detected, however, twice as many are yet to be discovered, experts believe.

Besides, a new study claimed that a space rock might have hit our planet five years ago. A paper from Harvard astronomers suggests that a meteor hit Earth's atmosphere above Papua New Guinea and might also be an outsider for our solar system. The researchers found that the meteor that hit our planet in 2015, by looking for objects that were very swift to be orbiting the sound.

(source)