The number of known near-Earth asteroids has just surpassed the threshold of 15000. That is a 50% increase with respect to 2013, when the 10000th object was found, highlighting the ever increasing success of ground-based NEO detection surveys.

The month of September was unusually rich of close approaches. Nine objects,all with a diameter of about 10 metres, flew by our planet closer than about the distance of the Moon.

The NEO Coordination Centre web portal is an evolving environment: new services are added whenever ready to be made publicly available. This is the case for two software packages addressing key issues in NEO science: an updated NEO population model and an NEO propagator.

2016 NA39 is a newly-discovered asteroid that for a few days in mid-July deserved attention. Because of its large size, around one kilometre, it became the highest rated object with possible impacts in the current century, scoring as high as Palermo Scale of —2.6.

The newly discovered asteroid (469219) 2016 HO3 has been attracting the interest of the NEO community becauseof its peculiar orbital path. Having the same period of revolution of the Earth but a higher eccentricity and being properly phased, this object appears to circle our planet in a retrograde “quasi-satellite” orbit with period one year.

The NEO Coordination Centre is collaborating with the European Commission project NEOShield-2 on the dissemination of NEO physical properties. Our EARN-based physical properties database will be enhanced to host additional data.

On 9 May the planet Mercury will transit the Sun as seen from Earth. Although not an asteroid event, this gives us a chance to talk about how transits have been used in the past to probe the population of small asteroids extremely close to the Sun (the so-called Vulcanoids).

We took the opportunity of the ExoMars 2016 launch to organize a ground-based observational campaign. The goal was to test, in a reverse mode, the observational scenario needed to monitor the approach of a small Earth impactor. The spacecraft and other hardware related to the launch was successfully imaged;

This month, while reading this newsletter, you will find an object designated with a “non-standard” name: XDg2F93. Labels like this, not following the standard form of year + letters + numbers,are called “temporary designations”.

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.