Did you know that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has a dedicated team to warn us of a possible asteroid strike? Their mission is to track near-Earth objects (NEOs) and alert the public of a potential world-ending disaster. Lindley Johnson, the lead program executive for Nasa’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, heads the team and has recently shared the agency’s step-by-step plan to notify the public of a looming threat and take action to prevent it from happening. The PDCO classifies a NEO as any object that comes within 30 million miles of Earth but does not raise alarms every time it spots it. However, it keeps track of each NEO it finds. “We definitely want to find all those before they find us,” he told Business Insider.
Here’s how Nasa has planned the sequence of events to warn people about an NEO posing a serious threat to the inhabitants of Earth:
