The month of June 2002, 15 years ago, marked the kick-off of six parallel preliminary studies carried out by ESA’s General Studies Programme (GSP) in order to analyse possible asteroid missions. Three of those studies were devoted to in-orbit telescopes for NEO discovery and characterization, other two were devoted to asteroid rendezvous missions and finally one for asteroid rendezvous and impact.

The month of December this year marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of ESA’s Gaia spacecraft. The mission, now operating continuously near the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, has already revolutionized many fields of astronomy, thanks to the broad and exquisite quality of the data it is producing.

Asteroid 2012 TC4is the target of an international observing campaign that will culminate this month during its close fly-by with Earth. The object will safely fly at about 44 000 km from the Earth surface, with no chance of collision with our planet.

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.

Asteroid 2023 DZ2

In our newsletter of December last year, we devoted this section to the discovery of asteroid 1997 XF11. Twenty years ago, on 11 March 1998, astronomer B. Marsden released an IAU Circular stating that the asteroid would pass within 0.002 au of Earth on 26 October 2028.

The month of September was unusually rich of close approaches. Nine objects,all with a diameter of about 10 metres, flew by our planet closer than about the distance of the Moon.

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.