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.