The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters in size and larger, but currently only 10 percent of this population has been found. The IG concluded that program management and funding for the planetary defense effort were insufficient for the task at hand.

Unfortunately, the IG’s audit missed a much broader and far more important point: NASA is not looking for the right rocks.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that pass within 1.3 astronomical units — about 200 million kilometers — of the sun, displaced from the main asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud by gravitational perturbations or collisions with other objects. Over time, some of these objects strike Earth, as evidenced by the hundreds of impact craters that dot our planet. The Barringer crater in Arizona highlights the destructive forces in play: The 50-meter asteroid that struck there 50,000 years ago gouged a hole 1.2 kilometers in diameter and released the same amount of energy as a large thermonuclear bomb.

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