In October 2017 the Pan-STARRS survey discovered the first known interstellar object transiting through our Solar System. Named ‘Oumuamua by the discoverers, it soon became the focus of numerous observations by the world's largest professional telescopes.

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.

November was a month of close approaches of many small objects. A particularly interesting case was 2015 VY105, which came to less than 30 000 km from the Earth’s surface on 15 November.

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”.