The mission of the Catalina Sky Survey is to contribute to the inventory of near-earth objects (NEOs), or more specifically, the potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) that pose an impact risk to Earth and it's inhabitants. The identification of the iridium anomaly at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (Alvarez et al., 1980), associated Chicxulub impact crater (Hildebrand et al., 1991) and the Permian- Triassic "great dying" possibly being associated with Australian Bedout crater (Becker et al., 2004) strongly suggest that impacts by minor planets play an important role in the evolution of life.
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