The end state for most near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids and comets that may pose a hazard to the Earth's ecosystem – has for the past two decades thought to be a collision with the Sun. A new...

One of our collaborators, E. Schwab, has been featured in a recent story by the Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain.

On the morning of 30 May 2017 our team, in collaboration with ESO and using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, obtained recovery observations of 1991 VG, a famous near-Earth object with an...

In the last observing slot the TOTAS survey found another NEO. This is the fifth NEO found in about 300 hours of survey time, which is a good result considering the field of view of the telescope....

On 15 Feb 2013, a very large fireball was reported over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Peter Brown from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, analyzed infrasound measurements of the event and deduced...

The data gathered by the US WISE mission have been released as public domain on 14 March 2012. This release provides improved calibration and processing algorithms.

NEOCC Image Archive reaches milestone

NEO techniques applied to optical tracking of satellites

Event to be held at ESOC (Germany) on 11-13 November 2024

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The May monthly update is still ongoing. Some objects, may be temporarily unavailable.

Warning: we are performing some maintenance activities on our system. Some services, including the ephemeris and APIs, may be unavailable.  

Warning: the Observation Planning Tool is currently under maintenance. It will be accessible as soon as possible.

The portal is under maintenance. Some of its features may not be available. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Attention. The NEOCC Priority List will soon be decommissioned. The data in the table, as well as the response from the corresponding REST API, are still valid for now, but will be turned off in...

The portal is under maintenance, we apologize for the inconvenience.

The topics available on this page are designed to help you navigate our site and understand its features. While we aim to cover the most common questions and issues, please note that some topics...

Introducing Aegis version 5, the new ESA operational software for asteroid orbit determination and impact monitoring.

Last update: 2025-03-31 10:00 UTC Richard Moissl Head of Planetary Defence Office Luca Conversi NEOCC Manager Juan Luis Cano Information Provision Coordinator Marco Micheli NEO Observer...

Former members of NEOCC Detlef Koschny SSA-NEO Office Co-manager (2010-2019) Acting Head of the PDO (2020-2022) Tobias Hoffmann Intern (2024) Selina Machnitzky Intern (2025)

The observational component of NEO science is an extremely important part of the impact mitigation effort, since observations are the input data for all the computational models used to predict...

The number of known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has just surpassed the threshold of 15000. That is a 50% increase over the number known in 2013, when we posted a similar news item on our portal for...

Asteroid 2016 RB1 has hit the news because of a peculiar close passage on 7 September 2016 at 19:20 CEST. About the size of a cottage, the asteroid flew past our planet at an altitude of 34000 km,...

Planetary Defence office we took the opportunity of the Solar Orbiter launch to perform an observational exercise, attempting to image the departing spacecraft with a ground based optical telescope.

A little-known asteroid will skim past Earth on 15 February, passing just 28 000 km from our planet. The 50 m-diameter chunk of space rock was discovered last year by ESA-sponsored amateur...

The first recovery campaign carried out by the ESA NEO Coordination Centre in coordination with ESO, using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) (VLT telescopes on the Paranal mountain in Chile (credit:...

The fly-by of 2020 JJ asteroid

The Planetary Defence community has detected the fifth asteroid impactor