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 NEOCC provides programmatic access to its data through a set of simple HTTPS GET endpoints that return plain-text responses. No authentication is required. All requests and parameters are...

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.