The telescope would have a mirror more than 6 meters in diameter and be able to detect objects as small as 300 meters across, Burns said at the hearing, "The Threat of Near-Earth Asteroids." The telescope would be designed to view the entire sky once as week, as opposed to current telescopes that look at only small, selected regions of the sky at a time.

At present, there is no single organization responsible for identifying a threat or mounting a response to these potential threats. However, NASA does have a congressional mandate to detect and identify by 2008 at least 90 percent of NEOs that are 1 kilometer in diameter or larger big enough, in NASA's words, to cause global devastation.

Funded to the tune of $3 million to $4 million annually, NASA's NEO survey had detected 619 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets out of an estimated total population of 1,000 to 1,200 by the end of September, Ed Weiler, NASAs associate administrator for space science told the subcommittee. NASA funds six groups with ten telescopes among them to conduct this type of research, he said.

Weiler believes NASAs future involvement in efforts to track NEOs should be focused on space-based platforms, leaving future ground-based telescope studies to "other agencies with far more expertise in ground-based observations," he said.

Burns said a combined NASA-National Science Foundation effort would have a better chance of accomplishing the task of charting all objects down to 300 meters across.

The current role of the U.S. Department of Defense is to support NASA efforts in this field, said U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon "Pete" Worden, deputy director for operations, U.S. Strategic Command. The military does have sensors that could help with tracking efforts and strong military involvement should be considered for NEO efforts, he said.