The month of December this year marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of ESA’s Gaia spacecraft. The mission, now operating continuously near the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, has already revolutionized many fields of astronomy, thanks to the broad and exquisite quality of the data it is producing.

For the first time since 2012 the year that just ended did not break all records of annual NEO discoveries. This was mostly due to unusually poor weather in Hawaii, where many current NEO discovery surveys are located.

On 22 June 2019, around 21:26 UT (17:26 local time), a roughly 5-metre object entered the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea, and exploded at an altitude of about 25 km over the sea surface, releasing an energy roughly equivalent to 3 kt of TNT. The explosion was first detected by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument on board the GOES-16 geostationary satellite.