President Barack Obama set a lofty next goal this week for Americans in space: Visiting an asteroid by 2025. But reaching a space rock in a mere 15 years is a daunting mission, and one that might also carry the ultimate safety of the planet on its shoulders.

An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth's orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.

Russia is considering a plan to launch a spacecraft capable of moving a huge asteroid in a bid to protect Earth from an impact, but the target space rock poses virtually no threat to our planet and moving it could actually make matters worse, experts say.

NASA needs more cash in order to meet its goal of finding nearby space rocks that could hit Earth in a devastating impact, a new report says.

Congress ordered NASA in 2005 to find and track 90 percent of the large asteroids near Earth by 2020, but did not set aside the necessary funds required to do the job, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Existing sky surveys miss many asteroids smaller than 1 kilometre across, leaving the door open to damaging impacts on Earth with little or no warning, a panel of scientists reports. Doing better will require devoting more powerful telescopes to asteroid hunting, but no one has committed the funds needed to do so, it says.

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere but a recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that these observations are classified.

In recently passed H.R.6063, The U.S. House of Representatives would direct the NASA Administrator to develop plans for a low-cost space mission to rendezvous with the Apophis asteroid and attach a tracking device.

As if forecasting whether asteroids will hit the Earth wasn't hard enough, it now seems that primordial black holes could surprise us by nudging a rock or two our way.

By the end of this year, NASA hopes to find about 90% of the largest asteroids that could potentially strike Earth, a blast that could throw dust into the atmosphere and cause firestorms and acid rain. These asteroids can be as large as mountains but are at least 1 kilometer (3,280.8 feet) in diameter. NASA estimates that 900 of these objects are in potentially hazardous range of Earth.