NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office helps find and track near-Earth objects, such as asteroids, that may crash into Earth.
Those objects are characterised to determine parameters such as their orbit trajectory, size, shape, mass, composition and rotational dynamics so experts can determine the severity of the potential impact event.
An object on a collision course with Earth could be deflected or disrupted to mitigate its effects.
Learn more about related missions in asteroid study and retrieval here or NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office here.
Originally published by Cosmos as How NASA protects Earth from deep space asteroids
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