NASA will 'fail to find 90pc of potentially dangerous asteroids' by 2020

NASA's inspector general has said that the agency won't be able to meet its goal of finding 90 percent of nearby and potentially dangerous asteroids larger than 460 feet in diameter.

The report, called NASA's Efforts to Identify Near-Earth Objects and Mitigate Hazards, by Paul Martin, has revealed that the agency has identified only about 10 percent of all asteroids 140 metres and larger, so far and given its current pace and resources, they will fail to meet the goal ordered by Congress before 2020, the Guardian reported.

According to the 32-page report by inspector general Paul Martin, NASA's efforts are poorly coordinated, ill-managed and under-staffed despite a ten-fold increase in NASA's annual budget over the past five years.

The report added that the agency manages a loosely structured conglomerate of research activities that are not well integrated and lack overarching program oversight, objectives and established milestones to track progress.

NASA has spent about 100 million dollars on programs to find, assess and mitigate potentially threatening space bodies and as of July 2014, the agency has discovered about 11,230 NEOs, including 862 of the largest asteroids.