NASA have announced plans to launch a ‘Doomsday task force’ aimed at battling incoming asteroids and other alien dangers heading towards earth. The financing for the Near-Earth Objects (NEO) monitoring program has grown from $4 million to $50 million since 2010, due to what NASA say are increasing asteroid threats in recent years. Sputniknews.com reports: Beginning in 2016, a special NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) task force will be responsible for identifying NEOs. PDCO will coordinate various activities between many national and international observatories and governmental bodies, including the Pentagon and the European Space Agency. Seeing asteroids more clearly: How radar imaging has improved from 2001 to 2015. https://t.co/ingXrpDepE pic.twitter.com/TpcGKe4wCq — Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) December 17, 2015 “In addition to detecting and tracking potentially hazardous objects, the office will issue notices of close passes and warnings of any detected potential impacts, based on credible science data,” NASA said. An Asteroid Watch Widget has also been published on the agency’s website. Currently there are about 1,500 NEOs identified and added into the database each year. NASA’s ambitious plan is to discover and identify 90 percent of NEOs at the size of, or a bit larger than, a football field in diameter – 140 meters (450 feet) – by 2021, as most of the bigger objects (1 km / [...]