"Apophis isn't the only threat, it's only one," said Andy Turnage, executive director of the association, "the vast majority of which haven't been identified."

IT systems will a play role in discovering future threats. In particular, there's an effort called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), involving 20 universities and national labs to build a large telescope on a 8,800-foot mountain peak in northern Chile, called Cerro Pachon. This telescope will have the potential of finding asteroids as small as 100 meters.

Once it begins operation in 2013, the LSST is expected to generate 30,000 gigabytes of data per night. In total, petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes) of data will be created in what may well become the world's largest database. The project is expected to cost about US$467 million, said Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager.

Google joined the effort last month. "They are going to help us with how the data is served and indexed -- how do you find stuff in petabytes of data," Sweeney said.

Meanwhile, Apophis speeds through space. At 1,000 feet in diameter, it has the potential of causing considerable damage, but the odds are that it won't hit Earth.