Grant Program to help discover more of the comets and asteroids known to be in our planet's celestial vicinity. The guidelines and application formfor the NEO Grant Program are now on line. Simply follow the links to them at the end of this article.
Earth lives in a swarm of near-Earth objects of different sizes and orbits.
The results of those impacts are seen dramatically on the crater-marked surfaces of Mercury, the Moon, Mars and the outer planet satellites. Because of Earth's oceans, the heavy atmospheric processes, and the modifications to the surface of the planet by life itself, such craters are less visible on Earth. Less than 200 NEOs have been discovered thus far. It is estimated there are several thousand such NEOs larger than one kilometer and 150,000 to perhaps 100 million larger than 100 meters in size. While various astronomical groups and NASA advisory committees have made strong recommendations to accelerate discovery of these asteroids, government support for NEO search programs is very modest.