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The US space agency NASA plans to double its budget for studying near-Earth objects this year, following a meeting last month to assess the progress of current asteroid searches (see Nature 392, 215; 1998).

The increase to $3 million affects only the 1998 budget, says NASA's Solar System exploration chief, Carl Pilcher. Future spending is yet to be determined. The agency will also set up a new office to coordinate research on near-Earth objects.

NASA underwrites the lion's share of such research in the United States, with additional funding coming from the air force. But past spending levels — between $1 million and $1.5 million a year — are insufficient to achieve the long-held goal of identifying most large, threatening asteroids within a decade. An estimated 90 per cent of such objects have yet to be detected.

The new NASA office will decide how to augment several searches for near-Earth objects already under way or planned. It will also decide policy for informing the public about future asteroid threats, which many scientists believe was bungled last month. Under a draft policy proposed last week, NASA-funded researchers would have to notify the agency and consult other asteroid scientists before issuing public statements.

Data on near-Earth objects received at the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would be released to scientists “generally within 24 hours of receipt”. Asteroid scientists have accused the MPC of not sharing data promptly.

Some non-US asteroid researchers are uneasy about a US government agency dictating who should talk to whom when an Earth-threatening object is discovered. The MPC, they say, operates under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and should remain independent.

But IAU's assistant general secretary, Hans Rickman of the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in Sweden, sees no problem, as long as NASA policy is not presumed to apply to all asteroid researchers worldwide. He says NASA “has every right to require certain things” of the researchers it funds. The IAU should formulate its own policy on asteroid warnings and data sharing, he says.

Rickman agrees that dissemination of data by the MPC “could be done more efficiently”. But he points out that the centre, which serves the entire international astronomical community, currently operates under severe financial and staffing constraints.