The first part of the Discovery Statistics page

It is widely acknowledged that NEO science is intriguing and often goes against common sense. A clear understanding of the meaning and importance of any text concerning near-Earth objects, their...

The word NEO stands for near-Earth object, indicating a small body of the Solar System which can come into the Earth’s neighbourhood. A broad classification of NEOs distinguishes NECs (near-Earth...

Even if an asteroid misses the Earth, it can come back and hit our planet in a subsequent "return". Whether this happens or not, depends on whether the object passes through well-defined regions in...

The first NEA, (433) Eros, was discovered by Gustav Witt from the Urania Sternwarte Berlin and independently by Auguste Charlois from the Observatoire de Nice, on 13 August 1898. The discovery...

SSA is the acronym of ESA's "Space Situational Awareness" programme, which was the precursor to the current Space Safety Programme. SSA ran between 2009 and 2019. More info at:...

The Torino scale is a function of the impact energy and probability of the event, with no reference to the time of impact. In the Palermo scale, the risk posed by a possible impactor is compared to...

S2P is the acronym for ESA's "Space Safety Programme”. Its aim is "the protection of our planet, humanity and assets in space and on Earth from dangers originating in space". More info at:...

PDO is the acronym of ESA’s Planetary Defence Office within its Space Safety programme (S2P). The goals of the Office are to: 1) be aware of the current and future position of near-Earth objects...

The possibility of browsing through the largest possible set of astronomical images and download them for inspection is extremely useful in order to find possible unidentified detections of NEOs or...

In the last observing slot at ESA's 1-m telescope on Tenerife, the previously 'lost' object 2009 XZ1 has been recovered. E. Schwab (Germany) has planned and analyzed the observations. The Minor...

A revision of the Apophis impact hazard assessment

Possible extension for the Hayabusa2 mission

The closest non-impacting asteroid

The full orbit determination and impact monitoring computations being performed at our premises

The fly-by of 2020 QG asteroid

The fly-by of 2020 HS7 asteroid

The fly-by of 2020 JJ asteroid

NEO Coordination Centre's observing campaign to track the fly-by of BepiColombo

ESA's NELIOTA project detects the flash of light produced when an asteroid collides energetically with the lunar surface and recently recorded its 100th impact.

Planetary Defence office we took the opportunity of the Solar Orbiter launch to perform an observational exercise, attempting to image the departing spacecraft with a ground based optical telescope.

The year has just started, and we already have a very interesting discovery of a new and so far unique asteroid.

If you check our current risk list, you will notice that a significant number of objects in the top positions are extremely “old”, discovered in the first decade of the century.

Over the past week, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) community in general, and ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) in particular, have been involved in an interesting example of the process of...

Asteroid 2006 QV89, a small object 20 to 50 meters in diameter, has been in the news lately, because of a very small 1-in-7000 chance of impact with the Earth on 9 September 2019.

One month ago, NEOCC team ruled out the possibility that asteroid 2006 QV89 would impact the Earth this September by making a “non-detection”, i.e. observing the area of the sky where the asteroid...

On 25 July, an asteroid the size of a football field flew by Earth, coming within 65 000 km of our planet’s surface during its closest approach – about one fifth of the distance to the Moon.

A new paper by Alessio Del Vigna and collaborators, published this week in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal, significantly revised the chances of impact of (410777) 2009 FD.

Hera will show us things we have never seen before. Astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May tells in the next video the story of the ESA mission that would be humanity's first-ever spacecraft...

For the fifth year, Asteroid Day is going to be celebrated worldwide on 30 June.

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office (PDO) has participated with several presentations at the 6th IAA Planetary Defense Conference held in College Park, near Washington, between 29 April and 3 May.

A newly-established collaboration between our team and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) led to the first-ever observation of an NEA with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). We...

The number of known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) reached the round total of 20 000 this week. This family of asteroids whose orbit brings them close to Earth is steadily growing at a pace of roughly...

A few months ago a long thin tail was noticed on main belt asteroid (6478) Gault. An international collaboration led by scientists of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii...

Andrea Milani, professor of mathematics at Pisa University, passed away unexpectedly last Wednesday while cycling near Pisa. With his deep knowledge and understanding on the Solar System dynamics,...

A potentially hazardous asteroid once found but then lost has been rediscovered and its orbit confirmed by a determined amateur astronomer working with ESA's space hazards programme. The...

During the last observing run with the ESA 1-m telesope on Tenerife (the OGS = Optical Ground Station) the SSA-NEO programme successfully recovered three 'lost' NEOs. In addition, one new NEO was...

A little-known asteroid will skim past Earth on 15 February, passing just 28 000 km from our planet. The 50 m-diameter chunk of space rock was discovered last year by ESA-sponsored amateur...

While the sky becomes more and more continuously scanned by ground and space-based NEO surveys, discovering objects in unusual orbital configurations represents the new frontier. Their dynamics...

Last month, ESA's near-Earth asteroid coordination centre triggered a series of European observations that confirmed an unknown object was, in fact, of human origin. The confirmation was the...

Soon after having been spotted in the sky on 8 October 2013 from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (Ukraine), asteroid 2013TV135 topped the Risk Page. Being a relatively large object (500 m in...

On 8 November 2013 asteroid 2013 TV135 has been removed from the Risk Page. The non-zero impact probability spotted by monitoring systems just after its discovery (on 8 October 2013) dropped...

If an asteroid is discovered which could come very close to Earth, it is important to coordinate observational activities quickly to better know its precise flyby distance.This is illustrated by...

The first recovery campaign carried out by the ESA NEO Coordination Centre in coordination with ESO, using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) (VLT telescopes on the Paranal mountain in Chile (credit:...

A team of European astronomers has found a previously unknown comet, detected as a tiny blob of light orbiting our Sun deep in the Solar System.

After discussing what to do to ensure that an important NEO is adequately monitored (see "news archive"), we will now present a possible strategy to improve the orbit of old objects, that have not...

The observational component of NEO science is an extremely important part of the impact mitigation effort, since observations are the input data for all the computational models used to predict...

The ESA Optical Ground Station has quickly become a major asset for the NEO Coordination Centre, thanks to the many nights devoted to observing asteroids. It is located at an altitude of 2400 m on...

Spotting Earth-threatening asteroids is tough partly because the sky is so big. But insects offer an answer, since they figured out long ago how to look in many directions at once.

Each year, astronomers worldwide discover over 1000 new asteroids or other space rocks that could strike our planet. And if one is spotted heading towards Earth, experts working in ESA and national...

One of the major goals of the ESA NEO Coordination Centre is to focus observations on objects with non-zero impact probabilities. When an asteroid quickly becomes very faint just after discovery...

An object discovered on 3 October 2015, temporarily designated WT1190F by the observers, will enter the Earth's atmosphere on 13 November. It was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey...

​​​​​​The impact of WT1190F in the Indian Ocean on 13 November (see our news item on 22 October) provided an excellent opportunity to simulate the observational sequence that needs to be triggered...

Asteroid 2016 RB1 has hit the news because of a peculiar close passage on 7 September 2016 at 19:20 CEST. About the size of a cottage, the asteroid flew past our planet at an altitude of 34000 km,...

The number of known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has just surpassed the threshold of 15000. That is a 50% increase over the number known in 2013, when we posted a similar news item on our portal for...

The word "precovery" has entered the astronomical jargon rather recently but it quickly grew in popularity among asteroid hunters. It refers to the finding of an archival observation of an object...

NELIOTA is an activity initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), which was recently launched at the National Observatory of Athens. The project aims to count and characterise the number and...

An international campaign has revealed that an asteroid will come within 44 000 km of our planet in October, providing a rare opportunity for intensive studies. Astronomers recently spotted...

As part of an international observing campaign, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been imaged during our normal monthly observing run on 16 September with the OGS telescope in Tenerife. In the attached...

A few weeks ago the Pan-STARRS survey discovered a new NEO, temporarily identified as P10G8tt and then formally designated 2018 AM12. Follow-up observations over the next few days allowed the...

During the first month of 2018 two objects reached a Torino Scale level of 1, and attracted the attention of observers with the goal of collecting additional observations necessary to remove the...

At approximately 09:30 UT on 14 April 2018 the Catalina Sky Survey, in Arizona, discovered a bright magnitude 15 object moving at a sky speed of 10" per minute, in the constellation Libra. ...

Every few hours observing the Moon, ESA’s ‘NELIOTA’ project discovers a brilliant flash of light across its surface – the result of an object hurtling through space and striking our unprotected...

New observations of asteroid Apophis rule out any chance of impact for at least a century

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office has just released a new NEOCC web portal

Additional information

Detecting an asteroid beyond telescope normal operation

First light of ESA's Test-Bed Telescope in Chile

NEOCC observations help in nailing down the orbit of 2021 PH27

On 19 October the Pan-STARRS telescope, one of the NASA-funded surveys dedicated to discovering new NEOs, found an object that proved to be extremely unique: for the first time, an asteroid...

ESA has inaugurated the new building for the NEOCC at ESRIN

NEOCC portal provides automated access to most of its data

The importance of accurate star catalogues and image archives for Planetary Defence

NEO Chronology Last update: 2021-11-01 06:00 UTC The updating of the NEO Chronology is currently on hold. Courtesy of Karel A. van der Hucht Last version 121.0 Download:.PDF For an explanation...

Typical behaviour of a non-impacting object in the risk list