Keep Tabs on Asteroids, Comets Heading for Earth

Know when to duck

If the plot of "Armageddon" is about to become a reality, a new NASA website will keep you posted before deep impact.

The Asteroid Watch site launched Wednesday, and is run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For the astronomy buff on the go, the site offers an RSS feed, embeddable widget and a Twitter feed.

The site provides information on NASA missions to study comets, asteroids and other near-Earth objects. It also provides basic facts, news about object discoveries and even a downloadable tool to track details about current near-Earth objects.

"This innovative new Web application gives the public an unprecedented look at what's going on in near-Earth space," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Objects Observation program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

As of Wednesday, no asteroids are on a collision course with Earth, according to the site's first tweet:

We're going live today, July 29,2009. It's a beautiful day in the near-Earth neighborhood !

Let's hope that streak continues.

JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
 

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