‘Spaceguard’ is the blanket term for human attempts to avert asteroid impact. It aims to identify any potential threats, rate them, and – if one were discovered that posed a serious, legitimate, near-term threat – work together with other agencies to try and deal with the threat. It lacks any kind of overall coherence, and also refers to a variety of different groups and nations all attempting the same thing. Spaceguard is thus not a brand, or a company, or a project, but a loose term for all the efforts directed at guarding us from NEO (Near-Earth Object) impact (or, rather, identifying the possibility of impact; protecting against even a predicted impact is a very different matter). There exists the ‘Spaceguard Foundation’ which bills itself as the centre of this activity, but national equivalents still remain.
The term Spaceguard itself was coined by Arthur C Clarke in his 1972 novel Rendezvous With Rama, in this writer’s opinion the best thing he 
ever wrote. It referred to a program for locating and cataloguing objects in the solar system that could pose a threat to human life, and inadvertently causes the discovery of the novel’s eponymous spacecraft. Subsequently, US space policy first mentioned the idea in the early 1990s, after which it gained interest and gathered funds. This raised profile has been one factor that has led to, in recent years, the emergence of a new kind of space consensus which considers them a potential landing target, not just a threat that requires abrogation. However, landing on an NEO would have relatively little impact on Spaceguard strategies. The compositions of many potentially-dangerous NEOs have already been estimated, and detailed knowledge of their chemical and mineral makeups are non-essential to predicting orbits, and therefore potential future impacts. Rather, it presents a target more challenging (and untested) than the Moon, but one less challenging and far closer to Earth than visiting Mars.
This ‘flexible path’ model is less committed to the clear goal of reaching Mars than a “Mars-first” paradigm. It is traditionally assumed that Mars is the next objective for global space exploration, but this is no longer a short-term opinion shared by global space policy-makers. Proponents of the flexible path generally either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge Mars as the next major goal for spaceflight, but consider it too technically challenging (and too difficult to raise the required political capital for) in the near future, opting instead for a varied, changeable global space consensus that can adapt rapidly to changing conditions and set more realistic, short-term goals, that should lead slowly towards the Martian goal.
There is, however, one strong correlation between the threat of NEOs and their attractiveness as a landing project. The greater the threat an NEO was, the more public support there would likely be for a visit, even if that visit actually had very little to do with reflection or abrogation of disaster. 
The most dangerous NEO currently identified has a minute chance of impact, but that NEO remains the most well-known, and therefore the most likely to get any kind of public support behind it. In fact, the necessity of removing the threat might be the greatest impetus to land on one in the first place. In the public eye, NEOs are close to asteroids, and asteroids – or those publically lumped into a category of equivalences – will never capture public interest like another planet would. It would seem more like a scientific mission, an interesting endeavour, a test of technology, to land upon one; not a momentous mankind-affecting occasion like setting foot upon Mars surely would. Indeed, perhaps the fact that the challenge of reaching Mars is so vivid in the imagination that any destination closer to home, however exotic, can never hold as much interest now that we have set a clear distance to cover in the next great step of space exploration.
