EU-ESA Workshop on Meteor Observations for Planetary Defence

Session

Optical fireball networks: capabilities and coordination

3 Nov 2026, 14:00

Petralia Sottana, Sicily

2. From Meteors to Planetary Defense: Current Knowledge, Recent Events, and Gaps

Eloy Peña-Asensio (Universitat d'Alacant)

03/11/2026, 14:00

Meteor observations provide a unique opportunity to characterize small near-Earth objects as they interact with the atmosphere, providing information that cannot be obtained from telescopic observations alone. In recent years, advances in optical networks, trajectory reconstruction, fragmentation modeling, and meteor physics have significantly improved our ability to infer the physical...

4. European Fireball Network: Complex characterization of fireballs

Jiří Borovička (Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Ondřejov Observatory, Czech Republic)

03/11/2026, 14:25

The European Fireball Network (EN) was officially established in 1968 after fireball stations in western Germany joined the Czechoslovak Fireball Network, which had been in operation since 1964. Various stations in countries of central and western Europe were used thorough the history of the network. The techniques developed from manually operated convex mirror cameras to current autonomous...

13. From Fireballs to Impactors: AMOS Meteor Network and Spectroscopy for Planetary Defence

Juraj Toth

03/11/2026, 14:50

The All-sky Meteor Orbit System (AMOS), developed at Comenius University in Bratislava, is a global network of autonomous meteor cameras designed to investigate the dynamical and physical properties of meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere up to about +3 magnitude. Combining multi-station video observations with meteor spectroscopy (AMOS-Spec), the network provides atmospheric...

21. Open discussions

03/11/2026, 15:15

5. The Global Meteor Network as a Planetary Defence Asset: Fireball Trajectories, Orbits, and the Physical Structure of Small Impactors from Citizen-Operated Cameras

Denis Vida (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada)

03/11/2026, 16:00

The Global Meteor Network (GMN) is a distributed optical fireball network of more than 1,600 cameras in over 45 countries, operated by volunteers using consumer off-the-shelf security cameras and Raspberry Pi computers running the open-source RMS software. Trajectories, orbits, and calibrated photometry are published daily, and the full analysis toolchain is open source and independently...

17. Ten Years of Observations of the Italian PRISMA Fireball Network: Results and Perspectives

Daniele Gardiol (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Via Osservatorio 20, Pino Torinese, Italy)

03/11/2026, 16:25

The recovery of freshly-fallen meteorite specimens, enabled by the precise observation of fireballs in the Earth’s atmosphere, is the only other method - beyond sample-return missions - to gather asteroid samples as pristine as possible. To this purpose, the PRISMA project (Prima Rete Italiana per la Sorveglianza sistematica di Meteore e Atmosfera) was born in 2016 and, since then, has...

22. Open discussions

03/11/2026, 16:50