One of our collaborators, E. Schwab, has been featured in a recent story by the Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

A bright fireball occurred over The Netherlands on 21 September 2017 at 19:00 UTC (21:00 CEST). In addition to many individual sightings, it was also recorded by an all-sky camera dedicated to recording exactly such events. 

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 image one can observe the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as the tiny point at the centre of the image moving from left to right. The larger spot moving in the same direction, but located more to the left, is main belt asteroid (50587) 2000 ET45.

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 asteroid 2012 TC4 under a collaboration between ESA and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to locate faint objects that might strike Earth. This is the first observation since 2012, when the asteroid was discovered by the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii. It was found this time by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

On the morning of 30 May 2017 our team, in collaboration with ESO and using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, obtained recovery observations of 1991 VG, a famous near-Earth object with an interesting historical background. 

Using a system developed under an ESA contract, the Greek NELIOTA project has begun to detect flashes of light caused by small pieces of rock striking the Moon's surface. NELIOTA is the first system that can determine the temperature of these impact flashes. 

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 which was not recognized as such because the corresponding image originally served other purposes. Hence the name "precovery", which explains why we may have direct measurements of an asteroid position at a time well ahead its discovery date.

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 crossing of the 10000 threshold.

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, roughly the same as the so-called "geostationary ring" where most telecommunication satellites reside. Yet it posed no hazard neither to our planet nor to the satellite operators.

ExoMars, the ESA/Russia mission en route toward the Red Planet, has turned into a remarkable observing opportunity for asteroid hunters. The post launch outbound trajectory of the spacecraft mimics, in a reverse mode, the challenging detection of a small Earth impactor. The NEO Coordination Centre has therefore organized an international observational campaign with the aim of obtaining ground-based optical observations of the spacecraft.

The end state for most near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids and comets that may pose a hazard to the Earth's ecosystem –  has for the past two decades thought to be a collision with the Sun. A new study published on Thursday 18 February in the journal Nature finds that most asteroids are destroyed much farther from the Sun than previously thought and long before they would have hit the Sun. This surprising new discovery explains several puzzling observations that have been reported in recent years.

​​​​​​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 if an actual asteroidal impactor were discovered.

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 (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css).

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 and stays that way for decades, the only option is to use telescopes that can see faint objects. It is essential then to be ready to catch a favourable opportunity when the object, although faint, is slightly brighter than average.

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 emergency offices need to know who should do what, and when.

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 distribution of near-earth objects (NEOs). NEOs are meteoroids, comets or asteroids found in the neighbourhood of the Earth.