NASA has recently created a new segment for the protection of Earth from collisions with comet or asteroid. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office is being headed by Lindley Johnson, a near-Earth object program executive at NASA, who is appointed as the planetary defense officer. The purpose of this office is to safeguard earth from any impact with near-Earth objects. The office is a part of the space agency’s Planetary Science Division in Washington.

The operational scope of this division involves monitoring all projects associated with detecting and tracking any cosmic objects passing near the orbit of Earth that can be potentially dangerous. The planetary defense officer will also be responsible for bringing together the interagency and intergovernmental measures in case of any impending impact scenario. He will also go ahead and coordinate with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Setting up of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office by NASA is evidence of the agency’s seriousness towards undertaking a leadership role in national and international measures that are being taken to identify these natural threats, according to Johnson. He added that the NASA will also perform planetary defense in case it is required.

“Asteroid detection, tracking and defense of our planet is something that NASA, its interagency partners, and the global community take very seriously,” said John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA will be able to detect the biggest approaching near-Earth objects through its Asteroid Tracking Widget, with almost 1,500 objects passing near Earth annually.

The agency is planning to launch new asteroid capture and asteroid redirect missions around mid-2020s. The plans are aimed at developing technologies to deflect or redirect the potentially harmful objects. The Asteroid Redirect Mission’s aim is to display the gravity tractor method’s effectiveness in planetary defense, by deflecting the object from its original course.