How are asteroids found?

Giuseppe Piazzi, an Italian priest and astronomer, accidentally found Ceres, the first and biggest asteroid, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, while drawing a star map in 1801.

Ceres, while being categorized as a dwarf planet today, is responsible for a quarter of the mass of all known asteroids in or around the main asteroid belt.

NASA has been leading a program to find and track near-Earth asteroids since around 2000.

According to CNEOS, programs like the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii specialize in locating asteroids and have identified hundreds of them.