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Hera: ESA’s Planetary Defence mission

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 to visit a double asteroid
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ESA contributes to Gault's activity identification

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 published a paper today explaining the mechanism that led to this sudden onset of activity.
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Learning from lunar lights

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 rocky neighbour at vast speed. Based at the Kryoneri telescope of the National Observatory of Athens, this important project is now being extended to January 2021.
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Andrea Milani (1948-2018)

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, Andrea was a pioneer in a discipline started by him and a few others at the end of the past century: asteroid impact monitoring. 
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2018 LA, the third predicted NEO impact on Earth

For the third time in recent history of asteroid detection a NEO was detected a few hours before it entered the Earth atmosphere (the two previous cases were 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA). Asteroid 2018 LA was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in the early morning (European time) of this Saturday, 2 June. ​​​​​​In a matter of hours additional observations were made and it became very probable that it would collide with the Earth.
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2018 GE3: a late-detected visitor in the Earth's neighbourhood

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.  Follow-up observations obtained over the next few hours, by Catalina's own facilities and by other observers in the US Southwest, quickly showed that this was an unknown asteroid, which was about to have a close fly-by with our planet less than a day later. The asteroid was subsequently designated 2018 GE3.
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An archival precovery

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 possible risk. One of them 2017 YZ1, was removed from the risk list within a few days thanks to new observations of various observers, including David Tholen from Hawaii, and our team working in collaboration with the OASI telescope in Brazil. 
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A large fast-rotating asteroid

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 determination of its distance, and consequently its absolute magnitude, which turned out to be roughly 21.4. This brightness should correspond to a diameter between about 150 m and 300 m, depending on the unknown albedo of the object's surface.
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'Oumuamua: the first interstellar object found in our Solar System

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 originated around another star had been spotted when transiting inside our Solar System. The object, first labelled P10Ee5V by the discovery team, was quickly followed up by a few observatories, including by our team using the ESA Optical Ground Station in Tenerife. 
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