US Representatives worry Trump's NASA budget plan will make it harder to track dangerous asteroids

The U.S. House Committee on Space, Science and Technology convened with scientists on Thursday .

The panel discussed the agency's highly anticipated Near-Earth Object (NEO ) Surveyor mission.

The mission is the first space telescope dedicated to locating asteroids that could threaten Earth .

It'll be the thing that spots the asteroid we may want to smash a future asteroid.

NEO Surveyor should be ready to launch by 2028 , perhaps sooner, but that is of course assuming the mission gets the funding it needs.

"Passback documents" suggested that the proposed cuts could lead to the closure of NASA 's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland .

"A very reasonable question is whether NASA should, in fact, be spending more money on asteroid monitoring and defense," Rep. George Whitesides said.

Previously, she was a science writer at CNET , and before that, reported for The Academic Times . Prior to becoming a writer, she was an immunology researcher at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York . She graduated from New York University in 2018 with a B.A. in philosophy, physics and chemistry. She spends too much time playing online chess. Her favorite planet is Earth ..