NEW AND AMAZING SPACE Technology: How to Find Dangerous Asteroids

Searching for potentially Earth-destroying asteroids today isn't easy.
They're dark, difficult to see from the surface of the planet, and there are a lot of them floating in the solar system. Scientists are now looking into new, higher-tech ways to find and track near-Earth objects, but for now, much of the hard work of asteroid tracking is done the old-fashioned way: with a telescope on a clear night.
NASA scientists, astronomers around the world and amateur observers with backyard telescopes devote their lives and free time to seeking out potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). [Photos: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids]

"It all begins with an observer making observations," Gareth Williams, of the Minor Planet Center, the clearinghouse for asteroid and other minor-planet documentation, told SPACE.com "They can be observing known objects, or they can be searching for new objects, but even if they're searching for known objects — just to take a pretty picture or some reason — new objects can come into the field. About one in 1,000 of these new objects turn out to be an object that's moving anomalously when compared to other objects in the frame."
Hunting asteroids
Anomalous motion — when an object moves in a different way than other bodies in a frame — can signal something to a keen observer. The skywatcher then reports his or her findings to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), located in Cambridge, Mass., and officials with the MPC search the organization's database to try to find a match with known, already-tracked objects.
If the new observation doesn't match any known object, the MPC puts it onto the NEO confirmation page — a database where observers can find information about asteroids with orbits that have not been sufficiently traced.
The MPC functions as the central database for all information about NEOs. The astronomers of the MPC — run by the International Astronomical Union — collect and help verify all of the space-rock sightings that are reported.
An interconnected group of observers and sky surveys work to validate claims of near-Earth-object sightings on a daily basis. This month alone, observers have discovered 80 NEOs out of 656,546 observations.