The fly-by of 2020 HS7 asteroid

Close Approach Fact Sheet for asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2

NEO Coordination Centre's observing campaign to track the fly-by of BepiColombo

ESA's NELIOTA project detects the flash of light produced when an asteroid collides energetically with the lunar surface and recently recorded its 100th impact.

Planetary Defence office we took the opportunity of the Solar Orbiter launch to perform an observational exercise, attempting to image the departing spacecraft with a ground based optical telescope.

The year has just started, and we already have a very interesting discovery of a new and so far unique asteroid.

The ESA SSA-NEO Coordination Centre has released the December newsletter.

If you check our current risk list, you will notice that a significant number of objects in the top positions are extremely “old”, discovered in the first decade of the century.

Over the past week, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) community in general, and ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) in particular, have been involved in an interesting example of the process of...

The "API support" for the NEOCC web services is currently limited to some HTTPS GET requests with raw text-based responses. Note that the API is considered as experimental — pending funding...

It is possible to visualise the orbits of all asteroids in our database by entering their name, provisional designation or catalogue number. The position along the orbit is computed at regular time...

The NEOCC is ESA's centre for observing and computing asteroid orbits and assessing their impact risk.

One month ago, NEOCC team ruled out the possibility that asteroid 2006 QV89 would impact the Earth this September by making a “non-detection”, i.e. observing the area of the sky where the asteroid...

Additional information

The first part of the Discovery Statistics page

The Torino scale is a function of the impact energy and probability of the event, with no reference to the time of impact. In the Palermo scale, the risk posed by a possible impactor is compared to...

The first NEA, (433) Eros, was discovered by Gustav Witt from the Urania Sternwarte Berlin and independently by Auguste Charlois from the Observatoire de Nice, on 13 August 1898. The discovery...

SSA is the acronym of ESA's "Space Situational Awareness" programme, which was the precursor to the current Space Safety Programme. SSA ran between 2009 and 2019. More info at:...

Even if an asteroid misses the Earth, it can come back and hit our planet in a subsequent "return". Whether this happens or not, depends on whether the object passes through well-defined regions in...

On 25 July, an asteroid the size of a football field flew by Earth, coming within 65 000 km of our planet’s surface during its closest approach – about one fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The word NEO stands for near-Earth object, indicating a small body of the Solar System which can come into the Earth’s neighbourhood. A broad classification of NEOs distinguishes NECs (near-Earth...

On 25 March 2015 our website experienced unusually high traffic for a few hours, seven times above our average rate. We tracked this boost of popularity to some news about the flyby of asteroid 2014 YB35 that were circulating on the web around that time.

The month ofApril saw two very important international meetings on NEOs taking place at the ESA ESRIN establishment in Frascati. On g—10 April the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) met for two days for their third regular meeting.

In recent years, it has become increasingly common for ground-based surveys to discover small objects that seem to be in distant Earth-centred orbits. Most of them turn out to be man-made spacecraft or upper stages of spent rockets residing in Earth’s region.

Some media attention was given to the distant fly-by of asteroid (1566) Icarus. Although the event in itself posed no collision threat whatsoever,Icarus is indeed an interesting object for the history of NEOs.

Two large objects have been observed in the month ofJuly. (85989) 1999 JD6 had a distant encounter with the Earth, while the newly discovered asteroid 2015 OL35 entered our priority list for follow-up observations.

September 2015 Newsletter

During the month of September a news circulated on European media claiming that between 22 and 28 September the Earth would have been hit by meteorites and other cataclysmic events.

Over the past few days there has been a significant media interest in 2015 TB145, a large asteroid that flew past Earth on the night of Halloween. Apart for the popularity of the event generated by the date,the fly-by itself is interesting from a scientific perspective, because it was discovered only three weeks before its closest approach.

November was a month of close approaches of many small objects. A particularly interesting case was 2015 VY105, which came to less than 30 000 km from the Earth’s surface on 15 November.

In the month of December, (29075) 1950 DA, an old NEA, entered the risk list in a peculiar way: the addition is not based on new observations but it is the combined result of an already existing good observational coverage for this object, together with a newly implemented dynamical model now available at NEODYS.

A new release of our NEO Web Portal is on-line at http://neo.ssa.esa.int/. It represents a major update of the SSA-NEO system since it includes a number of new functionalities and an improved graphics. The possibility of visualizing the actual trajectory of an NEO including gravitational perturbations and an enlarged plot at close encounter has been implemented.