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