In our newsletter of December last year, we devoted this section to the discovery of asteroid 1997 XF11. Twenty years ago, on 11 March 1998, astronomer B. Marsden released an IAU Circular stating that the asteroid would pass within 0.002 au of Earth on 26 October 2028.

Over the past few weeks some media outlets discussed the future impact possibilities of asteroid (101955) Bennu, the target of the ongoing NASA mission Osiris-REx. Bennu is indeed ranked near the top of our risk list, but the earliest year when an impact is possible is 2175, not 2135 as some reports stated.

On 25 April 2018 ESA’s Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium published the second release of the mission data products (known as Data Release 2, or DR2 for short). For the first time, Gaia astrometry of more than 14 000 known asteroids was made public, showing that the spacecraft can achieve astrometric precisions at the milliarcsecond level.

Current NEO statistics About 4% of the known NEO population is in the risk list. This value has remained roughly constant over the past years even if the discovery rate has increased.