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...