This TED Talk features asteroid hunter, Carrie Nugent, recorded live at TED-2016.

I am holding something remarkably old. It is older than any human artifact, older than life on Earth,

older than the continents and the oceans between them.

This was formed over four billion years ago

in the earliest days of the solar system while the planets were still forming.

This rusty lump of nickel and iron

may not appear special, but when it is cut open, you can see that it is different from earthly metals.

This pattern reveals metallic crystals that can only form out in space, where molten metal

can cool extremely slowly, a few degrees every million years. This was once part of a

much larger object, one of millions left over after the planets formed. We call these objects asteroids.

Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors. This graphic shows near-Earth

asteroids orbiting around the sun, shown in yellow, and swinging

close to the Earth's orbit shown in blue. The sizes of the Earth, Sun, and asteroids have been

greatly exaggerated so you can see them clearly. Teams of scientists across the globe are searching

for these objects, discovering new ones every day, steadily mapping near-Earth space.

Much of this work is funded by NASA.

I think of the search for these asteroids as a giant public works project,

but instead of building a highway, we're charting outer space,

building an archive that will last for generations.

These are the 1,556 near-Earth asteroids discovered just last year.

And these are all of the known near-Earth asteroids, which at last count was 13,733.

Each one has been imaged, cataloged, and had its path around the sun determined.

...