At a Glance

A computer program being developed by NASA will act as an asteroid intruder alert.The program, Scout, detects Near Earth Objects and calculates the potential risk. Scout detected a possible threat this month.

The possibility of an asteroid colliding with the Earth is a threat that scientists have become increasingly interested in avoiding. A computer program called Scout is helping them keep an eye out.

Scout is essentially to determine if there are any reports of Near Earth Objects (NEO), according to NPR.

On the night of Oct. 25, the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) detected a rock whizzing past Earth, NPR also reports. Within a few ours, preliminary details on the object were obtained by Scout, which did a quick analysis and determined the object was headed for our planet - but would miss by about 310,000 miles.

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NASA describes NEOs as comets and asteroids that have been " into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood."

"The new NASA surveys are finding something like at least five asteroids every night," NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) astronomer Paul Chodas told NPR.

In this year alone, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center has . The number of all-time NEOs detected tallies more than 15,000.

Now, the task at hand is figuring out which new objects might hit our planet.

"When a telescope first finds a moving object, all you know is it's just a dot, moving on the sky," said Chodas. "You have no information about how far away it is. The more telescopes you get pointed at an object, the more data you get, and the more sure you are how big it is and which way it's headed. But sometimes you don't have a lot of time to make those observations."

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"Objects can come close to the Earth shortly after discovery, sometimes one day, two days, even hours in some cases," JPL researcher Dave Farnocchia told NPR. "The main goal of Scout is to speed up the confirmation process."

In the event that a high-risk NEO was careening towards us, astronomer and B612 CEO Ed Lu told NPR that we won't exactly be helpless.

"If you know well in advance, and by well in advance I mean 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in advance which you cis something we can do, then you can divert such an asteroid by just giving it a tiny nudge when it's many billions of miles from hitting the Earth," said Lu.

He added that concrete plans are already in the works for dealing with asteroids that could be dangerous.

"I believe in the next 10 to 15 years we'll actually be at the point where we as humans can say, 'Hey, we're safe from this danger of large asteroids hitting the Earth," said Lu.

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: March 26, 2015, Asteroid Capture

A conceptual image of an astronaut, anchored to a foot restraint, preparing to investigate the asteroid boulder. (NASA)