One of the leading asteroids discoverers at Palomar was Dr. Eleanor “Glo” Helin. She began her hunt for asteroids at the Palomar Observatory using the 18-inch Schmidt telescope. She spent more than 20 years working on surveys to discover asteroids that pass close to Earth. During her career she discovered or co-discovered 863 asteroids and 20 comets.

Her work lead directly to the today’s Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program currently operates on Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope equipped with a 161-megapixel camera. Asteroids are large rocky objects in the solar system. Most of them lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but some of them have orbits that carry them near to Earth. The NEAT program is attempting to find all of the asteroids that have orbits that might carry them close to our world.

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