The European Commission and ESA’s Planetary Defence Office together are organising the “EU-ESA Workshop on Size Determination of Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Objects” on 11-13 November 2024 at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

The meeting's purpose is to gather the asteroid community to discuss how we can improve the size determination of asteroids, mainly focusing on near-Earth objects. During this workshop, we will discuss how the H magnitude is currently determined from observations, how the different physical characterisation techniques are used to determine the albedo, and the different techniques directly used to determine the object size. By convening the community, we aim to formulate suggestions, guidelines, and actions for the community to altogether work toward obtaining better size determination for potentially hazardous NEOs. Hoping that, if and when, an asteroid is discovered on a collision course with Earth, we will be able to obtain reliable and robust size determination.

A link to the event web portal can be found here.

The workshop sessions are the following:

• Photometric observations and H magnitude determination
• Thermal infra-red observations and modelling, shape modelling
• Polarimetric observations and albedo determination of NEOs
• General observation on NEOs

Workshop presentations have been organised by invitation of relevant speakers. Speakers and interested participants are invited to register to the event up to 31 October 2024. Ample slots have been allocated in the programme to allow discussions between the experts. A limited number of presentation slots are still available. If a workshop attendee considers having a relevant contribution in the subject and would like to present it at the workshop, please send a message to the organisers with a proposed title and abstract (maximum of 300 words) before 15 October 2024. The workshop will be hybrid, with local and remote attendance possible. A limited capacity of up to 40 people will be available for local attendance to the event. These will be available to the speakers wanting to attend in person and on a first come, first served for the rest of attendees.