“The space telescope is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. These are collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs.” Source: A statement from NASA as they announced the selection of SpaceX to launch its advanced asteroid hunting telescope to detect and track asteroids and comets that may potentially threaten Earth with a devastating impact.
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