[8] In June 2015, NASA and National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy, which had been studying impact events on their own, signed an agreement to work in cooperation.

[5][2][10] The PDCO was given the job of cataloging and tracking potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEO), such as asteroids and comets, larger than 30–50 meters in diameter (compare to the 20-meter Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013) and coordinating an effective threat response and mitigation effort.

[11][12] It has been a part of several key NASA missions, including OSIRIS-REx,[13] NEOWISE, and Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

For NEOWISE, NASA worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to investigate various impact-threat scenarios in order to learn the best approach to the threat of an incoming impactor.

The office would continue to use the polar orbiting infrared telescope NEOWISE, decommissioned in August 2024, to detect any potentially hazardous objects.