Results from EC-ESA Workshop on NEO Imminent Impactors Warning Coordination

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office has organised the EC-ESA Workshop on NEO Imminent Impactors Warning Coordination for December 2022 at ESOC, Germany. This action is foreseen within one of the activities entrusted by the European Commission (EC) to ESA within their SSA component. The workshop explored the possibilities of increasing the networking of actors involved in the process of discovering, acknowledging, tracking and observing NEO imminent impactors. Building up on the recent occurrence of the impact of 2022 EB5 on 11 March 2022, EC and ESA expect to increase the level of coordination and cooperation between all those actors, which include asteroid discoverers and observers, NEOCP object analysts, spacecraft operators and fireball network operators. Goals of the workshop are to establish a network of related experts and a communication protocol to ensure that the imminent impactor relevant information reaches all possible interested parties.
The workshop is organised around four main sessions:
1. New developments and updates to imminent impactor services
2. Observatories and observation networks for imminent impactors
3. Imminent impactor observation opportunities by spacecraft
4. Fireball networks and other sensing capabilities
In addition to the invited talks, ample time will be left for discussion among the experts and meeting attendees.
By the time the NEO and Debris Detection Conference will happen, the first conclusions of the workshop will have been derived and would be presented at the conference.