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Last year, NASA’s DART mission made headlines after it successfully smashed into the side of Dimorphos, the small orbiting companion of a larger asteroid named Didymos. That planned impact measurable changed the orbit of Dimorphos, heralding a new chapter in humanity’s ability to defend itself from cosmic threats.
One small problem: We have very little idea of what those threats are and where they might come from. Thankfully, NASA is hoping to change that.
How many near-Earth asteroids are there?
To put it mildly, rogue asteroids pose a major threat to our survival here on Earth. The largest asteroids — those larger than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across — are capable of triggering extinction-level events on Earth. However, large asteroids are relatively rare, striking Earth only every half-million years or so.
What’s more concerning are the smaller, much more numerous asteroids that are less than 0.6 miles (1 km) across. While those won’t destroy a civilization, they could still take out a major city or two, or trigger globe-spanning tsunami waves.
In 2005, the U.S. Congress decided that NASA should up its asteroid-detection game. Congress mandated that NASA identify, track, and characterize 90 percent of near-Earth objects (NEOs) with a diameter greater than 560 feet (140 meters). That’s so large that truly catastrophic things would happen should such an asteroid strike Earth.
There was a deadline for the mandate, too: NASA was directed to accomplish the NEO-detection effort by 2020.
One catch, however. Despite the clear directive, Congress didn’t authorize any additional funding for NASA to actually accomplish it.
NASA pushes for planetary defense
As the 2020 deadline loomed, the clever folks at NASA got creative. Instead of relying only on ground-based surveys, which were slow and difficult to fund, they prioritized new spaceflight missions, helping them sell the concept of planetary defense to Congress.
It worked. Congress approved the funding for DART a year before NASA even formally proposed it.
Along with DART also came a repurposing of the defunct WISE spacecraft, which had been sitting dormant in orbit for several years. Now called NEOWISE (for near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), the rebranded instrument is now NASA’s go-to facility for finding potential threats to Earth.
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