Flyeye poster

As part of the global effort to detect potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, ESA is developing a series of automated telescopes, inspired by an insect’s compound eye, to scan the sky every night.

A network of up to four ‘Flyeye’ telescopes spread across the globe will work together to carry out nightly sky surveys and automatically identify possible new Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could impact our planet.

These observations will be confirmed by human astronomers the next morning, before being submitted to the Minor Planet Center, where they will trigger the follow-up observations necessary to better understand the object’s orbit and chance of impacting Earth.

“We are working to ensure that Europe has the capability to detect hazardous asteroids larger than roughly 40 m a few weeks before a potential impact,” says Holger Krag, Head of ESA’s Space Safety programme.