"There's an 100% chance that if we don't do something, a dangerous asteroid will hit and people will be hurt and killed," said Bruce Betts, chief scientist and LightSail program manager for The Planetary Society.
Betts noted that a significant impact could happen at any moment.
According to a NASA Office of the Inspector General report, astronomers have cataloged nearly 40,000 near-Earth objects, though many remain untracked due to limitations in telescope sensitivity.
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"It's more important to find them, because you can't do anything about it if you don't know it's there," said Betts.
He emphasized that tracking infrastructure must expand to identify objects when they are still far from Earth.
"The key reason that we haven't met that, we as humanity, and we as NASA, is that we haven't had the telescopes with sufficient sensitivity to detect all of these asteroids, particularly when they're far from Earth," said Betts.
Planetary defense groups are working to find these hidden objects, as darker space rocks do not generate their own light and reflect very little sunlight.
"I think one of the biggest risks for us in planetary defense is that we don't know where all of these objects are," said Katie Kumamoto, head of the planetary defense group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"And we're doing a lot of work to find them."
Previous operations like NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test successfully altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos, proving that physical redirection is possible.
