ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre turned 10 years old on 22 May 2023. The Centre was inaugurated back in 2013 inside ESA’s ESRIN establishment close to Rome (Italy). It was a lucky coincidence that the Centre was opened just a few months after the most relevant asteroid impact event of the last hundred years, i.e. the Chelyabinsk event over Russia, which has fostered a surge of Planetary Defence activities ever since. The then ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Programme (since 2020 renamed as the Space Safety Programme) had been active since 2009 and had paved the way to the creation of the NEOCC.
At the time the NEOCC was inaugurated, slightly less than 10 000 NEOs had already been discovered. In just 10 years, that number has multiplied by more than three: during that period there have been twice as many discoveries as in the previous 100 years!