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

Each year, astronomers worldwide discover over 1000 new asteroids or other space rocks that could strike our planet. And if one is spotted heading towards Earth, experts working in ESA and national...

NEO Coordination Centre's observing campaign to track the fly-by of BepiColombo

​​​​​​The impact of WT1190F in the Indian Ocean on 13 November (see our news item on 22 October) provided an excellent opportunity to simulate the observational sequence that needs to be triggered...

Registration is open for the ESA NEO and Debris Detection Conference - Exploiting Synergies, which will be held at ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany, 22 - 24 January 2019. The deadline for the...

An international campaign has revealed that an asteroid will come within 44 000 km of our planet in October, providing a rare opportunity for intensive studies. Astronomers recently spotted...

The word "precovery" has entered the astronomical jargon rather recently but it quickly grew in popularity among asteroid hunters. It refers to the finding of an archival observation of an object...

ExoMars, the ESA/Russia mission en route toward the Red Planet, has turned into a remarkable observing opportunity for asteroid hunters. The post launch outbound trajectory of the spacecraft...

The closest non-impacting asteroid