Watch A Year's Worth of Asteroid Detection in 30 Seconds

​Science-fiction author Larry Niven once quipped that the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program, so if humans make the same mistake, it'll serve us right.

This quote always stuck with me, and not just because it makes me wonder what a dinosaur space program would look like. More pertinently, however, it points to an always-latent wrench in the spokes of our civilization. Even if we do minimize our risk of total annihilation by establishing off-Earth settlements, collisions with rogue asteroids, comets, or even orphaned planets will still be a threat.

After all, there's a lot of stuff floating around in space, and it's only a matter of time before the next big impact arrives.

That's why there is such aggressive advocacy within the space community for establishing a meticulous catalogue of potentially hazardous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)—bodies that will pass within five million miles of Earth or less. One of the most successful projects along those lines is NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope launched in 2009.

After its inaugural year of observing frosty brown dwarfs and star clusters, WISE ran out of coolant in October 2010, and was no longer able to keep its sensors safe from ambient heat. So NASA decided to rebrand the satellite as a full-time NEO hunter, henceforth calling it NEOWISE.

On Thursday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a video model of NEOWISE's third survey, which was conducted from December 2013 to December 2014. It's very illustrative of how NEOWISE uses Earth's orbit as a springboard to scan huge swaths of solar system real estate, rooting out the infrared signatures of NEOs as it passes by.

JPL's model of NEOWISE's latest survey. Credit: NASA-JPL/YouTube.

More importantly, however, the model reiterates how many objects populate our planet's vicinity. As Michael Byrne and Ben Richmond have written previously, NEOWISE has been a boon to NEO research, having discovered about 34,000 asteroids over the course of its first and second surveys. On top of that the telescope characterized a further 158,000 minor planetary bodies, of which about 700 were NEOs, before it was put into a two-year hibernation in 2011.

This most recent survey, depicted in the JPL video, was much more modest in its findings: during the last year, NEOWISE discovered 40 NEOs, and characterized 245 previously known ones, eight of which were revealed to be potentially hazardous.

Compared to the huge haul of the previous surveys, that may not seem like much. But given that NASA's asteroid defense program was scandalized by an audit a few months back, any progress in this arena should be noteworthy, no matter how small the yield it produces.

Moreover, the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor scare and the close shaves that followed it are reminders that there is a lot more work to be done in defending the Earth against catastrophic impacts. And as Niven wisely said, if we don't learn from the mistakes of our dinosaurian forebears, well, that's on us.