In 2009, Canada plans to launch a suitcase-sized spacecraft that will be charged with spotting asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. There's already a big ground-based program underway. NASA regularly identifies and tracks asteroids, calculating the likelihood that they could at some point run into our pale blue dot.

Make sure you don’t miss this one. Asteroid 2007 TU24 will be as close to Earth as it has been in 2,000 years, and it won’t get any closer in this century. With a diameter of around 800 feet, the space rock is large enough to cause some serious damage if it was ever to strike our pale blue dot, but astronomers say that is not a possibility.