News & Highlights
NELIOTA: third scientific publication
The third scientific publication of the NELIOTA project was accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysics on November 25, 2019 and is titled “NELIOTA: Methods, statistics and results for meteoroids impacting the Moon". The paper describes the methodology and presents the results from the first 30 months of the NELIOTA project, reporting 79 detections of impacts of NEOs/meteoroids on the lunar surface. We estimate that sporadic meteoroids with typical masses less than 100 g and sizes less than 5 cm enter the mesosphere of the Earth with a rate ~108 meteoroids/hr and also impact Moon with a rate of ~8 meteoroids/hr.
Multi-frame flash detected on July 7, 2019
On July 7, 2019, NELIOTA detected a bright flash, which was caught near maximum and appeared on several frames. It was recorded on 9 I-band and 4 R-band images. Τhe animated gif shows the evolution of the flash light curves and temperature. More details on this lunar impact flash are available here.
ESA extends the NELIOTA project to 2021
We are happy to announce the extension of the NELIOTA project to January 2021. Given the successful operation of the project and the detection of 55 lunar impact flashes to date, ESA has decided to continue the project by funding 24 additional months of lunar monitoring observations with the Kryoneri telescope in order to increase the impact statistics. The following press releases published today by ESA: “Learning from Lunar Lights" and Andor Technology: "Andor Zyla sCMOS Astronomy cameras capture lunar impacts" describe the main results of the project so far, as published in Xilouris et al. (2018, A&A, 619, 141) and announce the project extension. The image shows the location on the Moon of the 55 impact flashes detected to date by NELIOTA.