NASA's New Planetary Defense Office Gets to Work Protecting Earth

A new NASA organization dedicated to protecting Earth from dangerous asteroids has hit the ground running. In early January, NASA announced the establishment of a Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), which will synchronize U.S. efforts to deal with threatening near-Earth objects (NEOs) and will supervise all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that visit Earth's neighborhood. "There is no identified threat that we know of right now," said Lindley Johnson,