This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. It is a great pleasure to welcome three men from MIT who are going to help me with a mystery, which is the mystery of the asteroid belt, the main

asteroid belt, and every once in while you read about the possibility of an asteroid

plunging into Earth, as has happened many times before in the history of our planet.

However, the question is, will we be hit by something we see coming or will it come

from out of nowhere? And by the way, how do we know where the asteroids are and where they're

going to be? What tells us? How do we ascertain that data? There is right now underway the building

of a new telescope in Chile, the Vera Rubin

telescope that will be mapping the whole sky constantly. And that is said to be a great boost for planetary

defense. There is also a planned probe by NASA, Neo-surveyor, that's going to look for near-Earth objects,

something that could hit Earth.

However, we have a new kid on the block, and these gentlemen are going to help me introduce

how it is that they came to publish at Nature Magazine.

That's the top of the line, peer-reviewed magazine in Europe.

The American side of it is called,

the magazine is called Science.

Peer-reviewed.

J-WST, that's the James Webb Space Telescope,

citing of a decimeter main belt asteroids

and view on meteorite sources.

There's the breakthrough.

Professor Julian, I welcome you and ask you to help my audience understand what you're

looking for when you're looking small and why heretofore it was understood that it's very

...