On 9 May the planet Mercury will transit the Sun as seen from Earth. Although not an asteroid event, this gives us a chance to talk about how transits have been used in the past to probe the population of small asteroids extremely close to the Sun (the so-called Vulcanoids).

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.

On 19 October a very small asteroid, designated as 2018 UA, was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, and quickly flagged as a potential very close approacher. Immediate follow-up observations by both Catalina and the Spacewatch project led to a much more accurate orbit solution.

Ten years ago, on 6 October 2008,Richard Kowalski, an observer of the Catalina Sky Survey, spotted the first-ever asteroid found on an imminent collision course with the Earth. Over the following hours, hundreds of astrometric observations, plus light curves and spectroscopic data, were collected by observers all over the world.

We took the opportunity of the ExoMars 2016 launch to organize a ground-based observational campaign. The goal was to test, in a reverse mode, the observational scenario needed to monitor the approach of a small Earth impactor. The spacecraft and other hardware related to the launch was successfully imaged;

July 2020 Newsletter