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.

Close approach fact sheet for asteroid (3122) Florence. The fly-by is not very close to the Earth, but the object is large in size.

A small size asteroid will approach the Earth on 12 October 2017. The expected minimum distance is just above the geostationary ring, thus being a good target for radar observations.

The asteroid ground track is provided below starting one day before the closest approach and extending for 1.5 days. The curve represents the movement of the sub-asteroid point over the Earth along the mentioned time interval. The track starts in the Pacific ocean at magnitude 16 and progresses westwards.

Close approach fact sheet for asteroid 2010WC9. A small asteroid impacted the Earth on 15 May 2018.

The asteroid ground track displayed below represents the movement of the sub-asteroid point over the Earth, from the time of the first observation to its approach to the Southern part of Africa, just before its impact.

Close approach fact sheet for asteroid 2018WV1. A small asteroid impacted the Earth on 02 December 2018

A new paper by Alessio Del Vigna and collaborators, published this week in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal, significantly revised the chances of impact of (410777) 2009 FD.

Asteroid 2006 QV89, a small object 20 to 50 meters in diameter, has been in the news lately, because of a very small 1-in-7000 chance of impact with the Earth on 9 September 2019.

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...

Introduction The European Space Agency (herein the “Agency” or “ESA”) is an intergovernmental organisation established by its Convention opened for signature in Paris on 30 May 1975 having its...

For the fifth year, Asteroid Day is going to be celebrated worldwide on 30 June.

Asteroid and Comet Trajectory Propagator (NEOPROP) In 2012, Astos Solutions developed for ESA a new orbital propagator algorithm in order to assess the potential risk of impact of an NEO. The...

Directly the PDO manager Richard Moissl Head of the Planetary Defence Office Space Safety Programme ESA/ESRIN, Frascati, Italy richard.moissl[@]esa.int  

NEO Information Centres NEODyS - The Near-Earth Object Dynamic Site https://newton.spacedys.com/neodys/ AstDyS - The Asteroids Dynamic Site https://newton.spacedys.com/astdys/ The Minor Planet...

Albedo The ratio of reflected sunlight to incident sunlight. Given an albedo and the distance of the asteroid from the Sun and the observer, the size of an object can be estimated from its...

It is widely acknowledged that NEO science is intriguing and often goes against common sense. A clear understanding of the meaning and importance of any text concerning near-Earth objects, their...

The possibility of browsing through the largest possible set of astronomical images and download them for inspection is extremely useful in order to find possible unidentified detections of NEOs or...

The ESA NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) is the operational centre of ESA’s Planetary Defence Office (PDO) within the Space Safety Programme (S2P). It is located at ESA's establishment ESRIN...

Fireballs and bright meteors are small-sized NEOs, typically centimetres to metres in diameter, that collide with the Earth. They are sufficiently small to disintegrate almost completely in the...

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office (PDO) has participated with several presentations at the 6th IAA Planetary Defense Conference held in College Park, near Washington, between 29 April and 3 May.

A newly-established collaboration between our team and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) led to the first-ever observation of an NEA with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). We...

The number of known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) reached the round total of 20 000 this week. This family of asteroids whose orbit brings them close to Earth is steadily growing at a pace of roughly...

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...

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...

Placeholder article about most recent CAFS.

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,...

Registration is open for the ESA NEO and Debris Detection Conference - Exploiting Synergies, which will be held at ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany, 22 - 24 January 2019. The deadline for the...

'Oumuamua, an object from another star system that made a brief appearance in our skies turns out to be a tiny interstellar comet. Read more: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...