NASA’s Search for Asteroids

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NASA’s Search for Asteroids to Help Protect Earth

NASA places a high priority on finding Near- Earth Objects (NEOs) and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the agency is working with our partners in the U.S. and around the world to detect, track and characterize NEOs, especially those that might pose a threat to human populations.

NASA has been studying NEOs since the 1970s. They are asteroids and comets that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

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