The orbital path of 2011 AG5 has been carefully analyzed in the past year, due to its 1-in-550 probability to pass, during the moderately close approach to the Earth that will take place in early...

ESA today inaugurated a new hub that will strengthen Europe's contribution to the global hunt for asteroids and other hazardous natural objects that may strike Earth. Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs,...

A new series of images from Gemini Observatory shows Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) heading toward an extremely close rendezvous with the Sun. The images have been takenbetween February and May 2013 and...

Although Gaia's primary mission goal is the precise measurement of star positions and not observing NEOs, nevertheless it is likely to produce a significant contribution to NEO detection. This is...

In a fruitful collaboration between ESA and a group of amateur astronomers, the first comet was discovered by the so-called TOTAS survey. The comet is called P/2014 C1 (TOTAS) and has an orbit...

A bright fireball occurred over The Netherlands on 21 September 2017 at 19:00 UTC (21:00 CEST). In addition to many individual sightings, it was also recorded by an all-sky camera dedicated to...

With a mandate from the UN, ESA and other space agencies from around the world are about to establish a high-level group to help coordinate global response should a threatening asteroid ever be...

The fly-by of 2020 HS7 asteroid

An interesting connection between Earth Observation and NEO monitoring activities has been unveiled through the NEO Coordination Centre participation at the "Big Data From Space" meeting, held at...

May 2020 Newsletter

Current NEO statistics During the last month the global numbered asteroid catalogue (including main belt asteroid) surpassed the threshold of half million objects. The number of known NEOs surpassed 17 000, thanks to more than 300 discoveries in a single month.

The number of known NEAs reached the round total of 20 000 at the end oflast month. This group of asteroids is steadily growing at a pace of roughly 160 new discoveries each month, thanks to the work done by the main asteroid surveys.

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.

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.

March 2021 Newsletter

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.

Whenever a new set of observations for an object is published, our Impact Monitoring routines perform a new search for possibly impacting orbits compatible with such set of observations. The system is capable of detecting all possibly impacting orbits down to an impact probability threshold, named “generic completeness level”.

August 2021 Newsletter

August 2023 Newsletter

August 2022 Newsletter