If an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, someone would see it, right? Astronomers in Australia say that’s not the case, as recent budget cuts have shuttered the only comet-sighting program in the southern hemisphere.

Before it closed last year, the Siding Spring observatory spotted a comet that came within 86,000 miles of Mars just this past Sunday. If that sounds like quite a distance, consider this — the moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. While the comet was relatively close to Earth, astronomers at observatories in the northern hemisphere had no way of seeing it. NASA, for example, was worried that debris from the comets tail could impact orbiting spacecraft around the red planet, but were able to shift satellites to the other side in preparation, thanks to Siding Spring’s projections.

"There could be something hurtling towards us right now and we wouldn’t know about it,” University of California Berkeley astronomer Bradley Tucker told The Guardian.

An object is labeled as a potentially hazardous asteroid if it’s 500 feet long and likely to come within 4,598,000 miles of Earth. More than 1,500 known objects have met that criteria. NASA has discovered more than 10,000 "near-Earth objects" and is developing an Asteroid Redirect Mission to redirect those that might come frighteningly close to the planet. However, the agency would have to see the object coming in order to plan its response.