Placeholder article about most recent CAFS.

'Oumuamua, an object from another star system that made a brief appearance in our skies turns out to be a tiny interstellar comet. Read more: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science

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Close Approach Fact Sheet for asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2

The ESA SSA-NEO Coordination Centre has released the July newsletter.

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Last update: 2020-12-04 10:00 UTC On this page, the NEOCC provides problems (we call them 'riddles') related to the observation of NEOs, their dynamics and their characterisation. In irregular...

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...

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...

The first part of the Discovery Statistics page

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 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...

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...

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:...

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...

S2P is the acronym for ESA's "Space Safety Programme”. Its aim is "the protection of our planet, humanity and assets in space and on Earth from dangers originating in space". More info at:...

PDO is the acronym of ESA’s Planetary Defence Office within its Space Safety programme (S2P). The goals of the Office are to: 1) be aware of the current and future position of near-Earth objects...

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...

In the last observing slot at ESA's 1-m telescope on Tenerife, the previously 'lost' object 2009 XZ1 has been recovered. E. Schwab (Germany) has planned and analyzed the observations. The Minor...

A revision of the Apophis impact hazard assessment

The full orbit determination and impact monitoring computations being performed at our premises

The year has just started, and we already have a very interesting discovery of a new and so far unique asteroid.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

For the fifth year, Asteroid Day is going to be celebrated worldwide on 30 June.

A few months ago a long thin tail was noticed on main belt asteroid (6478) Gault. An international collaboration led by scientists of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii...

Andrea Milani, professor of mathematics at Pisa University, passed away unexpectedly last Wednesday while cycling near Pisa. With his deep knowledge and understanding on the Solar System dynamics,...

During the last observing run with the ESA 1-m telesope on Tenerife (the OGS = Optical Ground Station) the SSA-NEO programme successfully recovered three 'lost' NEOs. In addition, one new NEO was...

On 8 November 2013 asteroid 2013 TV135 has been removed from the Risk Page. The non-zero impact probability spotted by monitoring systems just after its discovery (on 8 October 2013) dropped...

An object discovered on 3 October 2015, temporarily designated WT1190F by the observers, will enter the Earth's atmosphere on 13 November. It was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey...

As part of an international observing campaign, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been imaged during our normal monthly observing run on 16 September with the OGS telescope in Tenerife. In the attached...

During the first month of 2018 two objects reached a Torino Scale level of 1, and attracted the attention of observers with the goal of collecting additional observations necessary to remove the...

Additional information

On 19 October the Pan-STARRS telescope, one of the NASA-funded surveys dedicated to discovering new NEOs, found an object that proved to be extremely unique: for the first time, an asteroid...

NEOCC portal provides automated access to most of its data

NEO Chronology Last update: 2021-11-01 06:00 UTC The updating of the NEO Chronology is currently on hold. Courtesy of Karel A. van der Hucht Last version 121.0 Download:.PDF For an explanation...

Large NEA steadily going out of the long-term risk list

Riskiest asteroid in the last months removed from the risk list

The image archive with capabilities to search and download selected image data

2021 PDC Impact Excercise

Last update: 2021-04-28 14:30 UTC This webpage does not describe a real potential asteroid impact. The information on this page is fictional and provided only to support an emergency response...

This new astronomical tool gives the user the possibility to visualise NEO orbits and asteroids collections in full detail within a highly configurable 3D environment

Event to be held at ESOC (Germany) on 12-14 December 2022